The Positive And Negative Impact Of Globalization In The United States

• However, there have also been significant domestic benefits to globalization for wealthier nations like the United States. Lower trade barriers, increased economic interactions, significance increases in real-time communications abilities between international organizations, and more emphasis on international cooperation - all consequences of globalization - have served to strength the U.S. domestic economy. Unfortunately, these economic benefits are offset by the fact that the U.S. is now operating under a massive trade deficit - a new and troubling impact of 21st century globalization. In past eras, wealthy nations benefits from globalization specifically because new markets were opened for goods and products; today, globalization has had

economy is the world's biggest, but it is now much more important as a market for the rest of the world than it was then... Whether to finance domestic investment (in the late 1990s) or government borrowing (after 2000), the United States has come to rely increasingly on foreign lending. As the current account deficit has widened (it is now approaching 6 percent of GDP), U.S. net overseas liabilities have risen steeply to around 25 percent of GDP. Half of the publicly held federal debt is now in foreign hands; at the end of August 2004, the combined U.S. Treasury holdings of China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan were $1.1 trillion, up by 22 percent from the end of 2003. A large proportion of this increase is a result of immense purchases by eastern Asian monetary authorities, designed to prevent their currencies from appreciating relative to the dollar. This deficit is the biggest difference between globalization past and globalization present. A hundred years ago, the global hegemon-the United Kingdom-was a net exporter of capital, channeling a high proportion of its savings overseas to finance the construction of infrastructure such as railways and ports in the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and Africa. Today, its successor as an Anglophone empire plays the diametrically opposite role-as the world's debtor rather than the world's creditor, absorbing around three-quarters of the rest of the world's surplus

The inescapable reality of globalization is that the world is becoming a smaller place. The interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness and awareness of differences between civilizations and commonalities within civilizations.The resulting political, cultural, and economic benefits have been enormous - but so too have the costs. Specifically, the costs to the U.S. domestic economy and our own national policies have been unprecedented. The costs of the global war on terror, both financial and human, have indeed been very high. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, in January of 2003, the war on terror had already cost the U.S. government $65 billion; of that $30 billion was spent in military operations in Afghanistan, the rest on homeland defense and security in the United States. If the cost of the war in Iraq is included as part of a broader war on global terrorism, the overall expenditure increases significantly. Following original budgets of $60 billion for the Iraq invasion allocated in early spring of 2003, Congress approved