Posted on 06/19/2012 5:42:17 AM PDT by Kaslin
"The entry into force of the U.S.-Korea trade agreement on March 15, 2012, means countless new opportunities for U.S. exporters to sell more made-in-America goods, services and agricultural products to Korean customers -- and to support more good jobs here at home."
Thus did the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative rhapsodize about the potential of our new trade treaty with South Korea.
And how has it worked out for Uncle Sam?
Well, courtesy of Martin Crutsinger of The Associated Press, the trade figures are in for April, the first full month under the trade deal with South Korea.
And, surprise! The U.S. trade deficit with Korea tripled in one month. Imports from South Korea jumped 15 percent to $5.5 billion in April, while U.S. exports to South Korea fell 12 percent to $3.7 billion. Suddenly, the U.S. trade deficit with Seoul surged to an annual rate of $22 billion.
Shades of NAFTA. When it passed in 1993, we had a $1.6 billion trade surplus with Mexico. By 2010, our trade deficit with Mexico had reached $61.6 billion.
There is other news of interest in those trade figures for those who chronicle the industrial decline of the United States.
In 2011, America ran the largest trade deficit ever with a single nation, $295.4 billion, with China. But this year, the U.S. trade deficit with China is running 12 percent ahead of 2011.
And the U.S. trade deficit with the world is now back up over $600 billion a year.
What do these mammoth and mounting deficits mean?
A deepening dependence on foreign nations for the necessities of our national life. A steady erosion of our manufacturing base. A continued stagnation in the real wages of the middle class. And an unending redistribution of America's wealth to foreign lands.
It is no coincidence that the real wages of U.S. workers ceased to rise in the mid-1970s, just as a century of U.S. trade surpluses was coming to an end.
In 1975, we began three decades of trade deficits that grew until, in the Bush II years, they reached 8 percent of the entire economy. These deficits helped to precipitate the Great Recession and helped to prevent our rescue from it.
For just as a trade surplus adds to the gross domestic product of a nation, a trade deficit subtracts from it, substituting foreign goods for U.S.-made goods.
If one would, in a sitting of a single hour, understand where and why America converted from the economic patriotism of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Cal Coolidge to the free-trade ideology of academics and ideologues, none of whom ever built a great nation, let me commend a splendid pamphlet from The Conservative Caucus.
"The Conservative Case Against Free Trade," by Ian Fletcher and William Shearer, is a brisk walk through the trade and tariff history of the republic. It is a short story of national decline, of how a nation that converted itself in its first century from 13 agricultural colonies into the greatest industrial power the world had ever seen began to kick it all away in the third century of its existence.
It is a chronicle of the rise and fall of the United States as a sovereign and self-sufficient republic.
The knock on economic nationalists is that they really do not believe in trade.
This is nonsense. Like libertarians, economic patriots believe in untrammeled free trade among the states of the Union.
They believe in the 14th Amendment's equal protection of the law. U.S. wage-and-hour laws, civil rights laws and environmental laws should apply equally to factories from New York to New Mexico and from Alabama to Arizona. If states wish to adopt their own right-to-work laws or abolish corporate income taxes, that is free and fair competition.
Global free trade is an altogether different matter.
If you move your factory to Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, China or Bangladesh, the 14th Amendment no longer applies.
Global free trade means U.S. workers compete with Asian and Latin American workers whose wages are a fraction of our own and whose benefits may be nonexistent. Global free trade means U.S factories that relocate to Indonesia or India need not observe U.S. laws on health, safety, pollution or paying a minimum wage.
Global free trade means that companies that move factories outside the United States can send their products back to the United States free of charge and undercut businessmen who retain their American workers and live within American laws.
Free trade makes suckers and fools out of patriots.
Anticipating the Davos crowd, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
Instead of a trade policy crafted for the benefit of multinationalist corporations, we need a new trade policy that puts America and Americans first.
Hillary looks like she just got taken to the woodshed
Free trade means this - in reality:
companies not within the US are free from the 5,280 onerous Federal regulations that have smothered business & manufacturing growth along with their concomitant endless taxes, inspections, & fees.
They are also free of one of the highest corporate income tax structures in the World.
While the argument about wages is valid, it is a drop in the bucket compared to the effects of the strangling government agencies, regulations, tax & fees listed about.
and THERE you have the real reason that manufacturing has deserted America.
Big Big Big Government!
We were very smart in the 1950’s and 60’s.
We had an embargo on China and ran a trade surplus every year.
Then Nixon came along and opened up trade with China in 1970.
Now we have a massive trade deficit.
Hillary looks like someone who can’t wait till November so she can me out of there.
I haven’t seen someone look so depressed since Tom Daschle.
sfl
Hillary looks like someone who can’t wait till November so she can me out of there.
I haven’t seen someone look so depressed since Tom Daschle.
Now we have a massive trade deficit. Post hoc ergo propter hoc
I could just as easily say that we had a trade surplus until Watergate, but starting in 1975, after Nixon's resignation, we began to run trade deficits. That's nonsense, of course, but it makes just as much sense as tying our trade deficits to establishing diplomatic ties with China.
Interestingly enough, though, Nixon is, in large part, the cause of our trade deficit and LBJ certainly played a major role, too. It was the massive inflation that started in the sixties but exploded in the seventies that caused our wages and prices to rise to the point that we were no longer internationally competitive in many industries.
It was this inflation that also caused the Rust Belt to develop in the northeast where union wages were already consuming capital and inflation-caused pay hikes made manufacturing completely unprofitable.
Usually, a country engaging in monetary inflation sees the exchange value of its currency begin to decline. This eventually causes a correction in the balance of trade as the country's exports become more attractive to foreigners. But, given the international reserve status of the dollar and the fact that many commodities (oil chief among them) are priced in dollars, America's currency is always overvalued. People all around the globe need dollars no matter how foolish our monetary policy.
So, the adjustment never occurs and foreign goods always remain cheaper for us.
If Washington would balance its budget and the Fed would cease printing dollars and maintain a stable money supply, the trade deficit would begin to disappear within months. No tariffs needed.
Buchanan doesn't realize this because he knows nothing about economics, though that never stops him from pontificating on them.
Wife just bought her 3rd consecutive Hyundai. Build better cars, America.
Her suit looks like she fell into an upholstery machine. But at least she is fully recovered now.
Actually, prolonged trade surpluses aren’t very smart (unless you’ve got a big debt to pay down). You’re simply exporting more stuff than you’re taking in, and in return getting promises of getting stuff later, but that stuff later will almost certainly be worth less due to inflation. Stuff is good.
I am, of course, not saying that our current policies of paying people not to work while making labor so expensive that we aren’t competitive aren’t moronic. Just pointing out that, contrary to popular belief, it is not the case that surpluses are good and deficits are are bad.
I may be way off, however I believe she is one of a very few in America who could stand toe to toe with Vladimer and not blink.
Now I do believe that Barack was taken to the woodshed by vlad today and the Kenyan ursurper cannot handle it.
There is no doubt in my mind that Barack cannot handle being spoken down to. The man would send thousands to their deaths for revenge.
Scary, very scary, unless you have Jesus Christ as your Saviour. Evil is on the rise, Satan is making his last stand.
I have no problem with free trade with other 1st world nations, if we can’t compete with them then the problem is with us, not them.
As for less developed nations and communists, we should have some strong trade barriers. There is no benefit to competing with workers who get paid a pittance a day.
But if a nation wants to threaten us, consistently oppose us, claim territorial ambitions on us or aim missiles at us, said trade should be levied with a tariff to the point that it begins to pay for the cost. That would include places like China, Russia, Venezuela and Mexico.
I hear you, but there are quite a few on this board that would say we need to impose a tariff on foreign-made cars [and everything else] so everyone is "forced" to buy American and we can return to the supposed glory days of the 1950's.
They insist that free trade is not about the individual. But your wife's purchase proves them wrong.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.