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Check the label on your Nikes, your Apple computers, your UCLA sweaters. Made in China, assembled in Korea, hecho en Mexico. It may seem like just one pair of shoes, one computer and one sweater, until you multiply it by every one you’ve ever bought.

Now look around. Try and find one thing in Ackerman Union made in America. Ask students on campus where their goods are made. Getting the picture? Here’s a frame – America’s unprecedented $600 billion trade deficit.

Should you be scared? Should you feel like a traitor to your nation? After Google-ing my fingers to the bone and having heated pressroom debates with my editor, intense discussions with a very patient UCLA senior economist and many futile phone calls to the White House, the answer is yes. And no.

Reasons to be scared: With every purchase of a Nike shoe or UCLA hat made in China, we increase our national trade deficit and, by extension, the grip foreign countries have on our economy. A sizable chunk of our trade deficit is comprised of imported American products made in foreign countries. Except American companies don’t have to pay import tariffs because the products are “American.”

This is called vertical disintegration, or “outsourcing.” Shipping jobs abroad expands foreign economies while shrinking ours. We “invest” abroad by buying goods not made here, then slap familiar brand-name labels on them. Look at your designer UCLA hat and fashionable Nikes and see the hands of underpaid Chinese laborers at the sweatshop end of a dime-on-the-dollar global assembly line.

If that’s true, how can our economy be growing? Don’t we outpace every other economy on the planet? The Cato Institute, a conservative think tank that is also the head cheerleader for privatizing Social Security, is more than happy to forecast blue skies. According to the institute, the supposed crisis is actually a sign of prosperity.

“There is no emergency. The trade deficit is not a sign of economic distress but of rising domestic demand and investment,” testified Cato policy wonk Daniel Griswold to the Senate Finance Committee.

In other words, as goes the conservative fairy-tale argument, we have more money to spend than other countries; that’s why we buy more of their goods than they do ours.

Now check your wallet (the one probably made in China). Witness the source of our prosperity. It gleams divine when hit by sunlight. Over 641 million credit cards are encased in the wallets of American consumers – the backbone of our economy – who, through $2 trillion of debt, fuel the “domestic demand and investment.”

It’s plastic, it’s magical, it’s your credit card. Buying things you don’t need with money you don’t have – the contemporary American passport to the heaven’s gate of “prosperity.”

But this prosperity offers some reasons to feel like a traitor. Vladimir Lenin, the architect of applied socialism, famously said that a capitalist would sell rope to his own hangman. Now we are actually buying the rope.

“The reality is, our current trade policies are not working. The middle class is shrinking. Poverty is growing. Average Americans are working longer hours for low wages, and our disastrous trade policy is one of the factors,” said Rep. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., in a recent FOX News interview. “We’re getting killed. And we’re selling out the middle class of this country.”

But if this is actually a crisis – one perhaps more immediate than the Social Security crisis looming 40 years from now – why isn’t our president out there Bible-thumping on the bully pulpit for Americans to buy American, for Christ’s sake?

“I don’t know. If I were sinister or conspiratorial, I’d say it’s because of those contributors telling him to maintain the status quo so they can continue to keep outsourcing,” said UCLA Anderson Forecast senior economist Michael Bazdarich. “Why don’t you call him and find out?”

I did. Guess what – the White House did not return my phone calls. Again.

Under current trade policies, an “hourglass” economy has developed. In 2003 alone, 4.3 million people, some from the middle class, have fallen below the official poverty line, creating a grand total of 35.9 million. At the same time, the main beneficiaries of the current “jobless recovery” have been corporations, taking 47 percent of the income increase in the last two years, as opposed to the 15 percent that trickled down to salaries.

The biggest irony might be that we are killing ourselves without knowing it. Bazdarich suggests that Americans are unique for their unpatriotic preference to buy “fashionable” foreign goods such as BMWs rather than all-American Fords.

But how many of us are actually conscious of that attitude? Even products made by American companies are manufactured abroad. Try to go into Ackerman and buy something you want, made by an American company, that’s actually made in America.

So am I a traitor for buying a UCLA hat made in China?

“If you’re a traitor, then there’re a lot of other traitors out there,” Bazdarich said. A lot, indeed. At least now I finally have something in common with our president. Probably the biggest traitors of all are the corporate traders exporting our economy.

If you’re not content with being like our president, and you find yourself in Ackerman with a UCLA hat in one hand and a moral dilemma on the other, Bazdarich has an encouraging thought.

“If enough UCLA students walk into Ackerman and demand to have UCLA hats made in America, they will do it,” he said.

Sounds like a challenge.

Lukacs is a third-year history student. E-mail him at olukacs@media.ucla.edu.