Posted on 02/11/2011 7:50:25 PM PST by FromLori
Perot is famous (among other things) for his statement during the 1992 presidential campaign that if NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) was not a two way street would create a “giant sucking sound” of jobs going south to the cheap labor markets of Mexico.
Both of Perot’s opponents (George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton) argued that NAFTA would create jobs in the U.S. because of business expansion.
However, the goods balance of trade for the U.S. with Mexico has been negative and steadily growing over the years. In 2010 it amounted to $61.6 billion, which was 9.5% of the total goods trade deficit last year.
So Perot has been vindicated in his opinion; expanded free trade has not been accompanied by an increase in jobs in the U.S. relative to the vast numbers of jobs created in the rest of the world as NAFTA became just a stepping stone on the pathway to global commerce.
Just how much the giant vacuum has been collecting has been calculated at GEI Analysis. The results are shown in the following two graphs.
The first shows manufacturing jobs lost each year starting with 1992 that are equivalent to the U.S. goods trade deficits over the past 19 years. The second shows the cumulative job loss, amounting to almost 29 million jobs by the end of 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Complete with charts. That’d make Ross proud, but sad that he was right.
NAFTA was the start of the end of the manufacturing base in the United States.
There were lots of jobs and few illegals in the southwest in the early 90’s.
Now we are covered by illegals across the country and the manufacturing jobs are gone.
Thanks Clinton.
duh. Only liars disagreed with ross on that. We all knew that didn’t we?
“Only liars disagreed with ross on that. We all knew that didn’t we?”
We knew it many, many years ago...
Don’t blame only clinton. Bush was in on it too.
We should have had a revolution like Egypt and made Ross president. But, that would have screwed up the NWO and we all know that is a no-no.
I suffered a trade deficit with my grocer so I cut off trade relations with them. I damn near starved to death!
President Perot would have have ensured this century as an American one.
Oh well I guess I don’t really mind learning Chinese.
Why do people trust a government that lies 24/7?Are people this GD dumb?
Perot attending the 2009 EagleBank Bowl in Washington, D.C.
I LOVE how the unions get a free pass in all of this.
Apparently a lot of people here would be PERFECTLY HAPPY paying UAW workers $150k to $200k per year, so that they could buy Ford’s $50,000 Pintos - which is EXACTLY where we would be now, had we prohibited competition from lower-priced labor.
I hate seeing our jobs exported as much as the next guy (actually, probably more, as I am able to understand the effect on national security this is having), but I am JUST AS INTERESTED in why we have to pay manufacturing workers two or three times what they’re worth, simply because they belong to a union.
I would REALLY like to see some of the Perot people address that - rather then enable more of it.
To bad”you damn near starved to death!”,we will survive,just don’t steal from our garden.You will not look good.
Nothing personal, From, still a good posting (didn’t realize it was you).
“I’m listening — I haven’t heard the answer,
but go ahead, that’s cause you haven’t quit talkin' Larry.”
The former presidential candidate blasts John McCain, and gets an education about Barack Obama’s religion.
(Page 1 of 2)
The phone rang and it was Ross Perot, who hasn’t given an interview in years. Perot, who won 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential election, making him one of the strongest third-party candidates in American history, got straight to the point.
“Remember what you wrote about John McCain in the March 13, 2000, NEWSWEEK?”
“Sure,” I lied.
“When McCain called Perot ‘nuttier than a fruitcake’?”
The Texas billionaire, now 77, still has some scores to settle from the Vietnam era, and his timing is exquisite. Just days before the South Carolina GOP primary, he wants me to know that McCain “is the classic opportunist—he’s always reaching for attention and glory. Other POWs won’t even sit at the same table with him.”
Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime top aide, says the Arizona senator has plenty of veteran support and many close friendships among other former POWs.
The Perot-McCain relationship goes back to McCain’s five and a half years of captivity in Hanoi. When McCain’s then-wife Carol was in a serious car accident, McCain’s mother called Perot for help. “She asked me to send my people to Philadelphia to take care of the family,” Perot says. Afterwards, McCain was grateful. “We loved him [Perot] for it,” McCain told me in 2000.
Perot doesn’t remember it that way. “After he came home, he walked with a limp, she [Carol McCain] walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona [Cindy McCain, his current wife] and the rest is history.”
Perot’s real problem with McCain is that he believes the senator hushed up evidence that live POWs were left behind in Vietnam and even transferred to the Soviet Union for human experimentation, a charge Perot says he heard from a senior Vietnamese official in the 1980s. “There’s evidence, evidence, evidence,” Perot claims. “McCain was adamant about shutting down anything to do with recovering POWs.”
Not surprisingly, McCain sees it differently. He has told me several times over the years that the myth of live POWs was a cruel hoax on the families. He chaired hearings into the issue in the 1990s and found nothing. “The committee did an exhaustive job and pored over thousands of records and every claim of a sighting, no matter how outlandish,” says Salter. “It was all untrue.”
Perot says he intends to vote for Mitt Romney in the Texas Republican primary on March 4, citing Romney’s experience in business and his family values. “When I went to the Naval Academy and met my first Mormons I asked why so many were excellent officers,” Perot recalls. “I learned it was because of their strong family unit.”
When I asked about Barack Obama, Perot said he admired his eloquence but thought it “a little odd that we would be less concerned about his background than being a Mormon.” Perot was pleasantly surprised when I told him that Obama was a Christian, not a Muslim, and relieved when I informed him that the e-mail Perot (and untold others) received about Obama not respecting the Pledge of Allegiance was a fraud.
Perot isn’t a Hillary hater, but he’s not a fan either, relating the bumper sticker he received that reads: “Monica Lewinsky’s Ex-Boyfriend’s Wife for President.”
The founder of a data-processing empire is still sharp in diagnosing what ails the United States. “The situation in 1992 was not nearly as bad as it is now,” he says. “If ever there was a time when it was necessary to put our house in order, it’s now.
“It’s like having cancer and being in denial. The conduct of the House and Senate is an embarrassment to the nation.” President Bush, Perot says, is a “decent person, but you can’t say the same thing about the people around him.”
Perot is appalled at the specter of big banks having to borrow from foreigners to stay afloat: “We have to go around the world with a tambourine and a tin cup.”
He attributes the success of China to the fact that even uneducated Chinese must learn 3,000 characters early in life, compared to the 26 letters in the English alphabet. “Their hand-eye productivity is incredible because of drawing the symbols,” Perot says, noting that most of today’s Ph.D.s in engineering are from China and India, and only a small percentage from the United States.
Perot offers no easy solutions, instead emphasizing “a strong moral and ethical base, strong homes and the finest schools.” He says he’s disappointed that big textbook companies successfully lobbied in the Texas state legislature to reverse his landmark school reforms.
The pint-size Texan with the funny voice and the big ears isn’t planning to run for president again, but says he will launch a Web site next month with plenty of the charts and graphs he made famous when explaining the deficit in 1992.
Before hanging up, Perot asked me to read the books he recommended on live POWs. I promised him I would.
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Did not take long for the blame bush guy to jump in.
Two term clinton destroyed our manufacturing base.
By 2000 it was well on it’s way to being gutted.
Once the ball was rolling the profit takers were selling the manufacturing capabilities overseas and retiring.
And look where we are now....
Not so much a SUCKING SOUND.. pulling business from USA... but a PUSHING SOUND ... taxes and regulations and MORE TAXES and MORE REGULATIONS PUSHING businesses OUT.
No problem never thought a thing about it :)
You got that part wrong.
I voted Perot the first time because of NAFTA. Unions had already priced themselves out of the market in the NE and had a high unemployment rate and Detroit was in decline when RP came along. He’s a Texas businessman, right to work state and all that. Plants were relocating to the south to escape the AFL-CIO poison.
Smell the mexican diesel bacon? RP said we’d all be making something like $5-7/ hour. Rather prescient.
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