Nick Shepard
2/10/2014
Individual Assignment #1
Summary
The United States of America’s economy has found itself on the tail end of a recession that supposedly ended four years ago according to some economists (MSN). Though America may be out of the recent recession, there are many factors in the United States economy that powers its members into believing that the recession is still clouding the air. A significant example of such an influential aspect of the economy is the manufacturing sector of America. Living through the unpleasant time of the recession, America saw a nearly doubled unemployment rate from 2008 to 2010. Figure 1 (Floating Path) shows a timeline of the most recent recession in U.S. history with unemployment moving from 8% to about 16% in a one and a half year timespan. As of a few years ago, the jobs lost in the recession had not come back until recently where the current unemployment rate is about 14%.

Figure 1
Companies have increasingly continued to outsource most of their work to countries all over the world. China is a large provider of goods that have been outsourced from the United States because of lower wages paid to their workers resulting in a much cheaper production. The production companies have not been able to keep up with the efficiency of production companies overseas in China for many years which has resulted in the struggling manufacturing sector of the United States. Not only is China taking jobs away from Americans in the manufacturing business, but the large pollution that the plants are creating is being carried by large winds across the Pacific Ocean and into the western United States. Even though most of the United States pollution is created by the North American country, adding another country’s is not ideal. In 2011, President Obama addressed the situation saying that for America to gain its economy