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've heard about 2nd Amendment rights and "cold dead fingers," have you not?
While I agree with your position whole heartedly, what happened to the other tenent of Christianity, "Love thy neighbor"? Did you get nothing out of yesterday's Gospel reading from Luke?
Build the moat, for the chilrun'!
What, no Monkey Pox or SARS?
Huh, JMO, the closed market that Buchanan promotes doesn't seem to work.
Sorry I don't want to be eating bark off of trees like they do in that closed market paradise called North Korea.
What does Jesus and the Bible say about "a borrower nor lender be"? We borrow 500 billion from foreigners each year to bring in imported products. America is doing a lot more buying than selling abroad and charging it to a red hot credit card.
Buy Danner.
You've got to be a hypocrite on this one. You've never financed a house or an automobile? Do you even realize that chances are if you're financing a home, there's a foreigner on the other end lending you the money in the form of a purchased mortgaged backed bond. You didn't know that did you? Maybe you should take the time to read that weblink that I offered. Read it carefully too so that you don't miss an opportunity to expand your base of knowledge.
You've got to be a hypocrite on this one. You've never financed a house or an automobile?
Rational financing (borrowing) is good.
Where when and how do you think we will pay back these trade deficits? Which cumulatively are in the 3-4 trillion dollar range? Your house will be paid off in 20-30 years and your car, 5 at the most. People love it when the mortgage is paid off and some burn it at a party. They are finally off the hook and debt free. This is not how the American nation is behaving when it comes to trade deficits
I'm hoping it will NOT be the case, but Bush may be a day late and a dollar short in attacking the one issue that permeates this entire nation - THE IMMIGRATION DISASTER.
The Chinese fix their currency to ours and do not allow it to float. I believe that the exchange rate is 8.4 of their Remimbi [spelling?] to our dollar. We've been wanting them to have their currency float for a long time now because they cut into our export markets through an artificial undervaluing - some estimate it to be 40% undervalued. Could it be that we have an unofficial policy to deliberately weaken the dollar so that the Chinese have to pay more for the items that they import? I don't know what's going on but I'm sure that it's more than meets they eye.
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.