Somebody is always going to eat our lunch. 

Last few years the lunch-munchers were the Chinese.  The news magazines and various pundits told us the Chinese economy would swamp ours.  Experts filled columns and wrote books to tell us the "Chinese Miracle" would humiliate us. Right.

When I was a kid it was the Germans.  West Germany’s surging economy was going to embarrass us.  And for a while it was the Soviet economy.  It was growing apace and spreading its influence around the world.  Kruschev promised the world that the USSR would bury us. Right.

Next at the chow line: the Japanese.  Dan Rather could hardly contain himself as he chronicled how Japan’s economy was rocketing ahead so fast that it would leave ours in the dust. Why those Japanese were buying Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center and half of Hawaii. We were bound to be doomed to second place. Right.

Lately, of course, it has been the Chinese who have been eyeing our soup and sandwiches.

How about we consider a few scraps of news.  In the first half of 2008 the Chinese closed 67,000 factories.  That is not a misprint.

In the first seven months of last year half of China’s toy factories shut their doors.

In one province alone three million Chinese workers were fired in the last 12 months or so.  Workers have been rioting, attacking government offices. New foreign investment in China has evaporated.