If it makes you guys feel any better, this is very healthy for us on a macroeconomic scale. To compete in a global economy, a country has to be very good at specific things that other countries are willing to pay for.
It just so happens that Americans are not very good at manufacturing simple things. We are, on the whole, too smart. Americans workers are generally too skilled and ambitious to be content with minimum wage, punch the red button on the clutch-disk-erator all day long type jobs. Rather, we are much better at skilled manufacturing (cars, trucks, F-16s, 747s, microchips...), as well as services like finance and banking.
This is very good news for us, since non-skilled labor is at the very bottom of the economic food chain. The high-end manufacturing and services that we excel at bring us much more money as a country. This explains why we as a people enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world, while China as a people suffers with one of the lowest.
Ed
