Posted on 02/23/2004 12:11:31 AM PST by ETERNAL WARMING
An index of American decline
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: February 23, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Sen. John Edwards did not win Wisconsin, but he closed a huge gap with John Kerry with astonishing speed in the final week.
The issue propelling Edwards was jobs, the lost jobs under George Bush, and Edwards' attribution of blame for the losses on NAFTA and the trade deals for which John Kerry voted in Congress.
Edwards has plugged into an issue that could cost Bush his presidency. Indeed, Kerry's sudden conversion into fiery critic of trade deals for which he himself voted suggests that he senses not only his vulnerability on Super Tuesday, but his opportunity in the fall.
For a precise measure of what this issue is about, one can do no better than to consult Charles McMillion of MGB Services here. Each February, McMillion methodically pulls together from the Bureau of Labor Statistics his grim annual index of the decline and fall of the greatest industrial republic the world had ever seen.
Since Bush's inauguration, 2.8 million U.S. manufacturing jobs have simply vanished. By industry, the job losses are heaviest in computers, where 28 percent of all the manufacturing jobs that existed when Bush took office are gone, semiconductors where we have lost 37 percent, and communications equipment, where jobs losses have reached 39 percent in just three years.
One in three textile and apparel jobs has disappeared, and the losses continue to run at the rate of 100,000 jobs a year. This helps to explain Edwards' rout of Kerry in South Carolina.
With the markets soaring, the Bush recovery is being called a jobless recovery. Not so. We are creating millions of jobs overseas – even as we are destroying manufacturing jobs at a rate of 77,000 per month in the United States.
Consider. Last year, we bought $958 billion worth of foreign manufactures and our trade deficit in manufactures alone was over $400 billion, more than $1 billion a day. Millions of foreign workers now labor in plants that manufacture for America, doing jobs that used to be done by American workers.
Not so long ago, Detroit was the auto capital of the world and the United States was the first nation in the production of televisions.
Now we don't make televisions any more. And our trade deficits in cars, trucks, televisions, video cassette recorders, automatic data-processing equipment and office machines added up last year to $218 billion. We retain a trade surplus in airplanes and airplane parts, but, because of the competition from Airbus, that is shrinking.
After airplanes, our No. 1 export in terms of a trade surplus is ... soybeans. Corn is next, followed by wheat, animal feeds, cotton, meat, metal ore, scrap, gold, hides and skins, pulp and waste paper, cigarettes, mineral fuels, rice, printed materials, coal, tobacco, crude fertilizer and glass. Airplanes aside, the United States has the export profile of an agricultural colony.
Our largest trade deficit with any country is with China. It has rocketed from $22 billion in Clinton's first year to $124 billion last year. "The World's Most Unequal Trade Relationship" is how McMillion describes it.
What were our best-selling items to China, where we ran a $2.8 billion surplus? Oil seeds and soybeans. What was China's biggest selling items to us? Computers and electrical machinery and equipment, where Beijing ran surpluses at our expense of $50 billion.
There are bright spots, however, in the bleak jobs picture painted by McMillion. State and local governments added 600,000 workers in three years. Some 21.5 million of us now work for state, local and federal governments – one in six Americans, 7 million more workers than we have employed in all of manufacturing.
Perhaps this is what the Weekly Standard is bragging about when it celebrates Bush's "Big Government Conservatism."
To read these numbers is to understand the breach that has opened up in a conservative movement last united when Ronald Reagan went home to California.
To neoconservatives of the Wall Street Journal school, these trade numbers are yardsticks of their success at creating a Global Economy and measures of their triumph in championing NAFTA, the WTO and MFN for Beijing. To the Old Right, however, manufacturing was a critical component of American power, indispensable to our sovereignty and independence, and the access road for working Americans into the middle class.
Seeing the devastation of NAFTA and its progeny, sensing rising opportunity in the industrial Midwest, Democrats are jumping ship on free trade. Bush, if he does not temper his enthusiasm for these one-sided trade deals, may just go down with it. If he does, one prays he will at least ensure the neoconservatives have first been locked securely in the cargo hold.
I am glad that one party has at last discovered the issue, next they rats will discover open borders and government spending. Then I will at last have a reason to vote again.
Since the GOP is morphing into the rats I guess it is ok for the rats to morph into the old gop. Fine with me, I put country over party.
I have no idea what you're trying to say -- and, I don't think you do either.
If your company is in the business of making and selling shirts, and then selling them in a global market, you have to be able to offer a price competitive with shirts made in Taiwan and El Salvador.
For the sake of argument (I don't know the actual numbers) let's say the total annual cost (wages/benefits/training, etc.) of a seamtress in Taiwan is $20K and in America its $100K. Regardless of the name and nationality of the manufacturer, where do you think shirts are going to be stitched together ??
Its a no-brainer, Taiwan of course.
Do you think its the government's job to hold a gun to VanHeusen's head and demand they make shirts in America with American labor ?? I don't think so. VanHeusen would go broke overnight - just look at Levi Strauss.
That's the reality -- there are no blue collar jobs that are earmarked uniquely American anymore. We have to do what we've always done best -- and that is to compete.
Right now our competitive edge is to innovate.
The Asians build things (electronics, cars, optics) very well and cheaply -- but, we're the innovators that create the ideas.
Right now, instead of sewing soles on shoes (say that fast three times), we have to focus on our unique abilities to be inventors and innovators, the originators of creative ideas.
In a global economy, that is our strength, coupled with our natural resources and our entrepreneurial freedom.
That's reality -- what's your solution ??
This has nothing to do with what IBM is doing: transferring jobs and capital spending to India where they have no essentially no market, no profits, to serve the US market where they have both.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I'll leave my cryptic rhetorical question, as it is, to provoke further thought and or argument.
But, they are wrong -- we are not evil, we deny them nothing, we do not oppress them.
The reality is, they oppress themselves.
"For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice. But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere." -- James 3:16
The absolute, primary job of our Federal government is to defend our nation against attack. Yet, not ONE person has been held accountable for the multiple government failures that allowed 9-11 to occur.
NOT ONE !!
Not so...Apparently it will come as a shock to you but there are quite a number of us conservatives that have to cash a paycheck at the end of the week...And some of us are anti-globalists...It's likely my job will next on the list that leaves the country so that it's very rich Belgian-ese owners can get even wealthier...
I don't know why I was born in the United States but I thank God that I was...And I will do what I can to keep it the way it is(was) in spite of you globalists...And if some democrats agree with me on this issue, good for them and good for the US...
This is why, on the globalist stage, the "free market" is, to coin a phrase, a chimera. Mainland China is not a "free market", nor are many other countries we trade with. Pretending that the world stage is one big "free market" is utter idiocy. When it is, then competition within a "free market" is theoretically possible. But, until then, we're just chasing rainbows. It does individuals and the country a disservice to pretend that fair competition is possible under those conditions.
That has got to change. Failure at any level must be "rewarded" with termination: the bureaucrats, government programs, departments. C'mon W, in your second term, please please drastically reduce government. Since Hillary is going to win in 2008 anyway, use the lame duck term to do the right thing.
It is natural for breadwinners to seek secure jobs. But the way capitalism has evolved, no particular job can be guaranteed. For professionals to enjoy the high probability of continued success, they employ greater mobility in terms of skills and location. That's just the way it is, and government service will eventually have to follow that pattern.
When in the Gospel of Luke Jesus speaks of loving your enemy, how does this cause you to feel? Admittedly, it causes me some serious discomfort. But let's just, for the sake of argument, limit this discussion to just "loving your [non enemy] neighbor". When Jesus speaks of having love for others, do you really think that He is asking [remember God does not require you to practice nor even believe Him] for you to limit your love toward Americans only? Maybe just Christians only? Maybe both?
How do you reconcile this with your faith. Because I'm here to tell you that I struggle and sin, daily, because of all the hard things that Jesus asks of me as a Christian. I'm not writing to tell you that your views and your faith are incorrect but I am telling you that I've come up with a different conclusion. I very well could be the one that's wrong on this one but I do believe that I'm being consistent.
Absurd...I will venture a guess that VanHeusen does NOT sell it shirts in Taiwan at the same price it sells to Americans...Now when this company sells it shirts to Americans for what it would have to sell them for in Taiwan, let 'em have at it...In the meantime, we are getting robbed...And losing our jobs to boot...If an American company can not afford to do business in the US with American labor, I'll help them move out...And they can stay out...
In the long run, nations which restrict freedom fail. Competitive necessity forces them to open up personal and economic liberties.
That is encouraging in a way, but also dangerous. The forces of globalism can be said to have brought the Islamic world to this violent point. The Islamic nations have been resisting modernism tooth and nail. A free Iraq ups the stakes tremendously.
And nobody ever said, or claimed, the the global marketplace was fair.
But, the macroeconomic (aggregate) reality is that America MUST compete globally, no matter how unfair competition from communist regimes and third world countries.
We ALL can see and identify the problems, the hardships, but you haven't offered any solutions.
Now, the Dems for example, they want to nationalize health care for two reasons. And neither one is to "help the children."
First, they want to profit and grow government on the back of health care issues.
Secondly, they want to take the healthcare burden off of big business, shift that cost somewhere else.
Is that a national concept you buy into ??
I've debated on so many of these threads that I'm very weary of running through the same arguments again and again in detail. Let me say that the answer lies in understanding simple concepts, like maybe a little less greed all around would be a good thing, that it isn't in our interest to sell out the country for short-term gain, or ruin your neighbor by selling out his career and family in the marketplace for thirty pieces of silver, or enabling countries who don't have our interests at heart to gain advantage in technology by giving that technology that we developed away. IOW, a little more enlightened capitalism, rather than voracious, unrestrained, destructive greed, is a better alternative.
All I can tell you is I try to be as obedient as I can. Sometimes my faith directs me to Samuel in the OT.
This prayer offers me guidance:
"We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease, and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love." ~~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
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