[A. Pole]

Free trade bump!

[oceanview]

dead on.

[Brilliant]

What a bunch of BS. This country has been running trade deficits pretty consistently for 40 years, but we continue to get richer.

[oceanview]

I think this guy reads our FR threads about offshoring.

[Asclepius]

Considering the vast excess supplies of labor in India and China, Asian wages are unlikely to rapidly approach existing U.S. levels. Therefore, the substitution of Asian for U.S. labor in tradable goods and services is likely to continue.

This is risible on its face. If Asia's only advantage is a relative price advantage then Asia itself is supremely vulnerable. Does anyone remember when everyone thought Japan would bury us economically? Whatever happened to the Japanese juggernaut, anyone? Meanwhile, Asia continues to subsidize the US by providing it below-market-value goods and services--and we're supposed to be the losers? Ask yourselves: is underselling your goods or services a sustainable practice?

[SwankyC]

Any minute now, lrudeboy and ToddsterPatriot will be here to lecture you about how we're exporting more than we import, most "import" cars are made in America and 93% of Walmart's goods are American.

[Nowhere Man]

I'll drink to that! I don't know who is worse, the free traders who fail to see that their ideas will wreck our economy, the Islamo-Fascists who want to blow us up, the Red Chinese who will want to blow us up at some point, or the libertine leftists. It's like the old song by Steelers Wheel, "clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right." B-) B-P

Good find, we got to keep this rolling and hopefully CAFTA will go down in flames.

[Cacique]

First: The article speak of "American" companies. No such thing, we have only transnational companies with offices here.

Second: It assumes that Americans are entitled to a set wage and to live in oppulenece and luxury. No such thing.

Thirdly: Capital has no nationality, it will go where it will gain it's greatest return. If slavery would be profitable, we would have slavery.

There are too many economists who believe that the United States can exist without manufacturing. Exporting so called "intelectual property" in the form of pornographic Hollywood movies that nobody wants to watch, novels in english that nobody can read.

The Chinese and our rivals understand that an industrial base is what makes a nation a military and by extension an economic power.

The idiots running this country have been selling and exporting everything but the kitchen sink. There will come a time when we will not even be able to manufacture our own military hardware as all the factories will be in China and Bangladesh.

We have been trading our trade and techonogical secrets in exchange for cheap labor. In the end we will have neither.

[mr_hammer]

Ping-a-roo!

[Ron in Acreage]

He leaves out the fact that only large companies report their hires to the government. Companies with 100 or less employees don't report new hires. Also, more and more people, like myself, quit their jobs and become self employed. We are not counted in the employment numbers. We have the best economy and the best standard of living in the entire world. This sky is falling rhetoric is getting about as old and stale as the DNC playbook.

[Logophile]

By 2024, the United States will be a has-been country.

No doubt about it—we are doomed.

Or at least that is what Paul Craig Roberts says. Even if we accept the gloomy picture he paints (I do not), it is remarkable that he proposes no solutions. No matter what, he says, the United States is slipping into Third-World status. It is a done deal; it cannot be stopped.

[LNewman]

Here's another:

Greenspan: Long-term rate puzzler
By Greg Robb, MarketWatch
Last Update: 10:10 PM ET June 6, 2005
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The decline of long-term interest rates over the past year despite the Fed's steady tightening remains a conundrum, said Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan.

[Penner]

In the 21st century, the U.S. economy has been unable to create jobs in export and import-competitive industries. U.S. job growth is confined to nontradable domestic services.

This movement of the American labor force toward Third World occupations in domestic services has dire implications both for U.S. living standards and for America’s status as a superpower.

Paging Mr. Greenspan...

[truemiester]

There is no "free trade" with Red China!

[junta]

Stan Roach has seconded this in a recent essay of his.

[citizen]

3rd World Economy bump [I guess we have to be a 2nd World Economy on our way to 3rd]

[hershey]

Is anyone in the admin. paying attention?

[nairBResal]

bttt

[Rockitz]

Thank you Harvard Business School and all your greedy progeny!

[RogueIsland]

Another dead-on article from Roberts. Thanks. Of course, it matters not, as the Free Traitors will ignore the economically obvious anyway. It's a religion with them. You'd have better luck trying to convince a Scientologist to become an Orthodox Jew.