A huge US trade deficit steadily building up to about 3-4% of GNP, makes you think that international trade, and in particular a flood of imported goods from China and of services from India, is to blame for the loss of US jobs. In fact, research shows that only 11 percent of the job losses in manufacturing-about 314,000 jobs-can be attributed to trade. In other words, 89% of all US job losses are NOT due to foreign competition at all. For instance, even in the 11% of the jobs that were lost, the real culprit was falling exports, not rising imports. We have the potential to create very high paying, high demand, high tech jobs if we focus our energy and efforts on EXPORTING. Exporting is the only way to reduce the trade deficit and create jobs at the same time.

What's more surprising if you look at the numbers is that off-shoring in the services sector (which we blame India for example) destroyed even fewer jobs than those lost in the manufacturing sector. The real causes of job losses during the past 5 years were weak domestic demand, rapid productivity growth, weak export sector, and the strong dollar.

Just as we moved a hundred years ago from the agricultural economy to the industrial age (with Henry Ford's Model T and the great national highway system), today we are moving from the manufacturing or industrial era to an information or intelligent era dominated by high tech services and value added manufacturing. The productivity in the industrial sector has grown significantly almost in parallel with the availability of global resources to do remedial and labor intensive operations. Both of these factors have resulted in a need for a lot less people to produce the same amount of output whether it's in manufacturing or the services sectors.

Less than 3% of people now work in the agriculture sector yet we produce more than we ever have. Yet when those farmers were being made more productive ie being replaced by the John Deere and Caterpillar machinery, there was a great amount of upheaval in the economy about "loss of good paying farm jobs". Today, we all welcome any innovation in the agricultural sector from use of automation to GPS to crop-engineering as a very good thing.

Global factors or competitive factors are not new either, they were also there 25-years ago and 100-years ago…just on a bigger scale. Before, the competition was from the neighboring county or the neighboring state or the 'southern states', now it's Asia, and Euro land and South America…they are just as 'neighboring' in this age as the 'southern states' were in the past.

Unfortunately, protectionism won't address the causes of the loss of US manufacturing jobs either. The real solutions are: to think about incentives to grow exports in a big way that's never been done before and to think about ways to stimulate domestic demand. Pushing countries with artificially low currencies to allow them to appreciate against the dollar is a very risky proposition as well. For example, if Chinese were to do that it would raise the prices on 70% of US domestic purchases causing inflation and loss of living standards. The economy would tank and result in even bigger job losses. Sure, the domestic suppliers would be more competitive and since their capacity is fully utilized right now, they would raise prices as well and again inflation would go up causing the economy not only in the US but worldwide to slowdown. And, if this is done overnight, US and possibly global economy would go into a shock and possibly recession.

To boost job growth, we need retooling of our economy through accelerated deployment of technology and training, period!