Posted on 09/10/2004 2:36:36 PM PDT by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
OK, let´s suspend the bashing of President Bush and his Democratic presidential opponent John Kerry for their stupefyingly awful records and platforms on trade policy. Let´s turn instead to how their utter inability to understand America´s globalization challenges will sandbag other major policies they´re pitching. To date, there´s no better example than Bush´s goal of turning America into an “opportunity society.”
Anyone who likes free markets and capitalism, will rightly love the concept of an ownership society; and it´s no wonder that the Republicans are making it a centerpiece of their economic platform (even if most details remain to be filled in).
Ownership´s essence is that the individual knows how to handle resources better and more responsibly than the government. So the crises America faces in, say, health care costs and retirement security are best dealt with by giving Americans “more control over their lives,” in Bush´s words.
If the taxes currently financing government´s gigantic role in these areas are cut, then individual Americans can take the proceeds and purchase their own medical care, and make the investments they find most promising to pay for their golden years. Further, not only are individuals more likely to make the choices best for their circumstances, but they also will have overwhelming incentives to use their windfalls as efficiently as possible. Along with the elimination of costly government bureaucracies, these efficiencies will produce savings for the entire economy.
Ownership society advocates also seek, in the President´s words, to enable more Americans to use tax relief to “own their own home or their own small business,” as well as to choose their own job training program to keep them competitive in the global marketplace.
These ideas are so innovative and optimistic that only gloom and doom liberals and other economic girlie-men would object, right? Not by a long shot – at least if you pay any attention to the economy and its major features and trends.
Each of Bush´s proposals faces compelling objections on its own terms. For example, are individual investors really supposed to keep up with the nanosecond-by-nanosecond changes in the financial markets? Even most finance professionals fail at this task. Is health care really just like any other good or service, and will consumers really shop for it just like they shop for sneakers or SUVs?
But the biggest obstacle to the ownership society is the steady stripping from Americans of the resources needed to buy control over their lives. And one of the biggest forces behind this worsening incapacity is a trade policy designed to plunge Americans into competition with much lower-paid third world workers, and drive down domestic wages and salaries in the process.
The facts are beyond dispute – except among Washington´s bought and paid for globalization cheerleaders. Adjusted for inflation, total U.S. private sector wages peaked at $8.62 per hour (measured in 1982 dollars), in April, 1978 – scant years after the great opening of the U.S. economy to imports began in earnest. Real manufacturing wages peaked at roughly the same time, at $8.97 per hour. (We won´t bother with public sector wages because they´re not directly set by the market.)
Since these peaks, real private sector wages have fallen 4.4 percent – a performance previously unheard of in American history. And manufacturing wages, which are most affected by international competition, have fallen 5.6 percent. Worse, even though the economy has technically been recovering from the last recession for nearly three years, real private sector wages during this period are up only 0.4 percent, and real manufacturing wages are up only 1.4 percent.
More disturbing, signs keep appearing that the link between work and economic viability is growing weaker in America. Last month´s announcement that the official national poverty rate had risen in 2003 for the third straight year, to 12.5 percent, attracted deserved attention. At least as important, however, is the large and growing number of impoverished Americans who are working Americans. One in every four working Americans today earns less than $8.70 per hour (in 2004 dollars) – the effective federal poverty-level wage. As social policy analyst Beth Shulman wrote on Labor Day in the Washington Post, this trend “undermines our most fundamental [national] ideal: that if you work hard, you can support yourself and your family.”
Far from encouraging greater responsibility-taking, these trends inevitably are creating greater government dependencies. One indication: The share of Americans enrolled in government health-care programs such as Medicare and Medicaid stands at a two-decade high of 26 percent. And as made clear by rising federal budget deficits, the national appetite for public services regardless of the public´s willingness or ability to pay just keeps growing.
It should be obvious to everyone why stagnant and falling incomes will doom the opportunity society. Tax cuts will only marginally help workers who earn increasingly meager wages and, therefore, have less and less taxable income to begin with to cut and transfer to private health and retirement accounts. The idea that these workers will be able to buy a business or a home after tax cuts is downright moronic. Tax cuts will be equally pointless for workers deciding among job training programs if the economy keeps losing job opportunities that can pay a living wage.
In other words, tax cuts and privatization can´t drive U.S. economic policy unless the United States retains, or rebuilds, a meaningful tax base. If President Bush knows how to do this without reversing his outsourcing-centered trade policies, now´s the time to tell us. But that´s unlikely unless his opponents start asking him.
Alan Tonelson is a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Educational Foundation and the author of The Race to the Bottom: Why a Worldwide Worker Surplus and Uncontrolled Free Trade are Sinking American Living Standards (Westview Press).
Is that better?
Companies are making profit. They want more. And as has been pointed out over and again - they didn't like supply and demand in the local market so they broke and ran. Now we're supposed to believe they like supply and demand - but we see they just like the supply from elsewhere while demanding US profits and more of them after feeding the slaves..
Slaves is cheapa massa.
So what.. A job is not a right... You want the government to control the "evil" companies??
So if we disown the companies and tear up their articles of incorporation and revoke their business licenses to operate in the US... If you're going to sink US workers we have every right to sink the business. Afterall, the business doesn't have a default right to operate in the US - does it.
The incorporation papers and licenses are granted at the leisure of the people. They can be similarly withdrawn. Hello.
That wouldn't be "fair" would it.. lol. Fair is a matter of ethics. You don't understand ethics; but, I'm sure you understand the smackdown.
LOSERs? lol. You're parading about with the name of a Hippy who married a whacknut job like Yoko and you want to hurl mud. Glass houses, bud.. rofl.
Life was not meant to be fair...
I'd really like to see the Free Trader response to this, as it seems difficult to find a country to 'outsource' the job of creating a stable environment for the 'global economy' our captains of industry always speak of.
Oh really. What you really mean to say is that since your nonsense makes it unfair, you wish to dodge by saying it was never meant to be fair. The appropriate thing to say is that 'life isn't fair' which is true; but, true only because we make it that way or allow it to be made that way.. which is the point being discussed. You want it to be unfair and to your advantage while we point out the ethical side of it and try to riegn you in. We've come a long way from each man farming for himself and selling the extras to being told a man can't do that and that he owes something to everyone else for the ability to do that - especially to you so you can have a cut in someone elses labor. Equity is only equity if it's more equitable for you, right. Let's can the pretense and look at why you can't address the issues head on and have to dodge. How about lets start shredding licenses.
Problem is these guys got a taste of hard cash on the top end and lost all sense of reality while they ditched their ethics in the endless search for more money. Their judgement has been impared by green. They have no real thought for their fellow citizens save for how they can use them to get more green. And everyone apparently owes it to them to make sure they get it.
Agreed. Those "international" American corporations who ordinarily distain patriotism in favor of profits sure do find it handy from time to time.
Yep, the government will no longer have access to a source of funding for its deficit spending, and any taxes that it manages to collect will have to go overseas to pay the interest on the debt already accrued.
Of course, if we default, we can always give them some of our hard assets instead of currency. Do you think China will accept Alaska and all its oil instead of our worthless paper currency?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1215681/posts
This is killing me. Free traders say Ethics have no place in the profit environment and decision making realm of big business.. What do we do with CBS then ROFL. The absurdity of the tea party. Anyone ready to dump some crates?
Piece of cake, apparently.
Though Mr. Medved (today's second hour of his show) and his guest did not address the need for working class blood to defend them and their enterprises, they did make it clear that there was little desire for working class sweat to work for them. We Americans are just too stupid, lazy, temperamental, entitlement-crazy, and too expensive.
(Didn't Michael Moore say essentially the same about us Americans while he was in Europe?)
Outsourcing: It's us dummies' fault, not the poor corporate executives' fault.
We are poorly educated, to a man and woman, too stupid and lazy to augment our public educations and do well in college. We empower liberals in exchange for entitlements. We sue employers a lot.
What's a poor executive to do?
So asks Michael Medved and his guest promoting a book about bringing jobs back to America, "Bringing the Jobs Home."
What's a poor executive to do?
Over there are ten foot tall, brilliant workers. Here are the scum of the earth, us American workers, though both men allowed that it is not entirely our fault that we are such undesirables.
If the burden on the poor, suffering executives is to be lifted it's entirely up to us, the American workers. We Americans of the working class must stop proudly wearing a sign saying, "We are very expensive and we don't know very much. We will sue you, Mr. employer, if you 'look crossed-eyed at us.'" (Almost an exact quoted of Mr. Medved and his guest, BTW.)
Bringing the jobs (key word jobs) home. You see, the author Mr. Todd Buckholtz (sp) complained about the numbers of brilliant, outstanding foreign scholars being graduated from our universities and how utterly stupid and bad for America it is to send them home. Let them work here, he demands. Bring the jobs home, indeed.
And what about jobs for Americans? "Take two generations to get your act together and call us in 2040," I suppose is what Mr. Medved and guest would say.
BTW I don't know what Medved's stake in this debate is, but he's strident almost to the point of being hysterical, which is surprising because he's calm & patient on most other issues.
Bump!
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