The dam broke and the money is flowing out

With the weakening of the boundaries limiting the flow of money and goods outside the US a lot of changes are occurring which are obvious, foreseeable and unavoidable. What they are not is "surprising". In a supra-national economy, goods, money and services flow to the "lowest points", just as water does when the dam fails. The poorer countries in the world are getting more of our money injected into their economy, and the poorer people are getting at least some of that money. At the same time, we have less money per capita. What's so surprising about that?

We raise cotton. We ship it by rail to the West Coast, by ship to China. Cheap labor in China turns the cotton into blue jeans (or whatever), and they ship it to us AND to other countries. We buy back the jeans and sell them at Walmart. The money that in the past was spent inside the US in jeans-producing factories is now in China, where the labor is cheap and the money gets spread around. The workers and business owners in China have and spend more money, and their economy improves. Overall, perhaps (and I don't believe this) our economy improves, or is supposed to, although now we can see that it isn't. The laboring class of worker in the US has less work and less money. In effect, the flow of money outside the US has resulted in redistributing the money among the working class.

While the union movement in the US was necessary, it has resulted in the working class here pricing themselves out of the world market. We no longer produce steel, because steel workers had such high salaries that the price of steel became unreasonable, and we lost our market to those who will work for less money. One of the choices our workers had was to work for less money; they elected (through their unions) to lose jobs and close shops.

Money flows where the free market directs it, and as it does, it equalizes itself all around the world. It will continue to do so until it reaches its level. During the initial period (i.e. NOW), the amount of change is very large, as when the dam initially breaks. Eventually, as it approaches a general level, small differences in costs and income will result in small and continuing readjustments in the production of goods and services.

Where we have forced a large disparity in costs through an artificial boundary, such as in the cocaine market, the money flows in exactly the same way. Our excess of money finds its way to poor countries where it becomes a major source of capital for other investments. Drug lords spend money, lots of it. That money is distributed, and at least some of it to the poor and laboring class. Even their luxury purchases like yachts and condos in Spain have to be built by workers, who ultimately get some of the money and in their turn redistribute it in their local economy. In its turn this increase in standard of living in Afghanistan or Columbia results in more stability in their government, which usually benefits us.

It's quite easy to predict how the economy is going to move over the next 50 years, always providing that the elements of the system remain about the same (e.g. no calamities, world-wide plagues, etc). The US will continue to get poorer as the money flows out. Eventually things will stabilize on a considerably lower level, but we will no longer be the "richest country in the world". In many ways this is the logical outcome of capitalism and free-market enterprise. The richer countries will be the ones who make and produce unique products and services for the rest of the world, not just for themselves. They will want more money coming in and more goods and services going out, and that will be the ONLY way a nation can enrich itself.