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.
You appear to think that America will be running this new globalist world...I'm not that optimistic...Besides, look at all the perceived "mistakes" that were made in writing the constitution...Far too much power to the people...
I don't believe I've seen a truer nugget of wisdom on one of these "outsourced" threads, than what you've just written above.
I'll add another item to it (another bit of inspiration that just hit me) . . .
In order for the U.S. to maintain a high standard of living at the same time we are increasingly uncompetitive in the global labor market, we end up employing ever-growing numbers of people in government agencies, law firms, regulatory bodies, consulting firms, etc. These all add to the cost of doing business in this country, but because the cost they add is several layers removed from the actual price of any given product, they are not readily apparent. As a result, Americans end up paying indirectly for a lot of things collectively (agricultural subsidies, OSHA compliance, "clean air," "clean water," "safe products," etc.) that they would have no interest in buying themselves if their real costs were apparent.
Let's hope that the rest of us are using a computer that - although has a Microsoft operating system - was manufactured by a company without such a partisan hack as B-Jobs. I'm sure glad that you help Apple advertise it's product, lord knows, it needs the market share.
And what's up with this?:
...Which is a lot more than can be said for free-trading, gay-loving, soccer-mom courting liberal RINOs.
The gay name calling? Hey, it's doubtful many in here support gay issues, but damn, do you have to be such a homophobic? I hope that there's not some deeply rooted issue conflicting within you that needs to be worked out!
I'm not talking about the Chinese. I'm talking about me and thee. Greed begins at home. Destructive greed, greed for greed's sake, the pursuit of profit at all costs, even at the expense of one's brother or mother and the country one lives in, destroys everyone it touches as surely as any threat of socialism or communism.
Do you think its reasonable a UAW floor sweeper makes about $30/hour plus benefits - is that the way to keep jobs in America ??
Like I said, less greed all around would be a step in the right direction.
Maybe we should nationalize American industry, and the government can pass out workfare jobs the same way they do now in the public sector. I'm not being glib, some have offered that alternative as a workable alternative.
Again the false dilemma, raising the bogeyman of "government interference", the bugbear of globalist apologists everywhere. Well, of course, under other alternatives, there is no need for it. Try a little less greed. You'd be surprised how it helps cure what ails the sick soul.
That's noble, but who gets to make that decision? Who should make that decision? One man's greed is another man's betterment. While I agree with your statement, Adam Smith already addressed its short sightedness when he wrote of the invisible hand in the market place.
I stipulated the world is not a fair marketplace, especially when dealing with communist regimes exploiting prison labor and third world economies.
That's not fair - but, it's reality and we have to deal with it.
Other than changing the world, what's your practical, pragmatic, real-world solution ??
Become communists so we can compete with the Chinese on their own turf ??
BTW, where are Mac G4s manufactured these days ?? Somewhere in Asia, right ??
I don't know what you mean by trade, but trade is not negotiated through the WTO.
WTO is an organization where trade regulations and practices are discussed and negotiated.
Each of us as individuals. Real change begins there. Don't worry, I'm looking in the mirror...
One man's greed is another man's betterment.
Not if it destroys not only the one victimized, but the practitioner of unrestrained greed as well. Its like a cancer that consumes you from within. But unlike cancer, it can also destroy other individuals, and a people. That is the road we are now traveling, and I hope that enough of us crying in the wilderness (like FR) can pull us off of that ultimately self-destructive path.
No question it may be a long-term deal to get people to change their attitudes. But we have to convince enough people, or perhaps fewer but those in a position to make a difference, that ruining the country and its citizens in pursuit of greater and greater "profits" is ultimately self-destructive. It's like a drug user who eventually ODs because he needs more drug, or the drunk who eventually drinks himself to death (and a nod to you, Nicholas Cage). Getting off the destructive treadmill is the key, but that takes the desire of the individual to do so.
On your Hyundai example, the last time I was in the new car market, most prices were very similar. I didn't see any $2000 KIAs or Hyundais, which might better reflect their actual production costs and so be reflected in the retail price. The consumer does not capture the economic benefits of reduced costs from offshoring until that filters down to the retail price. And that is set by what those doing the selling think those who are doing the buying will pay, and whether or not those buying are willing to pay that for what they think they're getting. Right now the companies think the consumer is willing to pay $19,000 instead of $2,000, so that's what the price is. And as long as they can sell a reasonable quantity at that price they will keep the price there. And where does the difference so? It isn't going to the consumer, and likely not to the foreign worker making $3/hr on the assembly line. So where does it end up? Well, take one good guess...
(Here's a hint: greed is involved.)
It is not the government's duty to provide jobs - it is the government's duty to get out of the way of those who do.
Government regulations on small businesses are outrageous! I owned two Credit Bureaus and a Collection Agency and the "rules and regulations" almost made it impossible to do business. It never ceased to amaze me how a bunch of Washington Bureaucrats thought they knew what was best for our industry when they knew absolutely nothing about it. Every single time Congress was in session there would be more regulations coming our way. A large corporation made me an offer I couldn't refuse and I sold out. I've never regretted it one day since!
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