Posted on 10/04/2007 7:07:18 AM PDT by SJackson
I've seen a lot of opinion polling, but my jaw dropped when I saw this result from our special NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll of Republicans in advance of next week's presidential candidate debate sponsored by CNBC, MSNBC and the WSJ. By a nearly two-to-one margin, Republican voters believe free trade is bad for the U.S. economy, a shift in opinion that mirrors Democratic views and suggests trade deals could face high hurdles under a new president.
Six in 10 Republicans in the poll agreed with a statement that free trade has been bad for the U.S. and said they would agree with a Republican candidate who favored tougher regulations to limit foreign imports. That represents a challenge for Republican candidates who generally echo Mr. Bush’s calls for continued trade expansion, and reflects a substantial shift in sentiment from eight years ago.
"It’s a lot harder to sell the free-trade message to Republicans," said Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, who conducts the Journal/NBC poll with Democratic counterpart Peter Hart.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
Start with that Mankiw fellow. ;-)
Cheers!
Cheers!
Wow are you in for a rude awakening!
Are you laying claim to a Universal PreceptTM?
So, Hillary will get elected anyway?
Iran will get nukes anyway?
Ron Paul will get elected anyway?
Means, motive, and opportunity affect more than criminal suspects.
And without powerful efforts by many people acting in concert, China would still be a 4th-world basket case.
Cheers!
BZZZZT. Ad hominem bullshit.
I didn't see that Will88 was claiming to be a great economist, but he was pointing out (factually or not) that Friedman was wrong about enough things that bending the rules to allow "argument by authority" wouldn't fly in Friedman's case.
Answer the charge about Friedman, and show why his successful predictions are RELEVANT to the issues discussed here. :-)
Cheers!
Something is rotten when it's more profitable to make something thousands of miles across the ocean and then schlepp it all the way over here.
Doesn't make sense that can be kept up forever.
Sooner or later it becomes too expensive (wages and other costs rise overseas and/or our starving workers will take any salary), and it will be cheaper to make it back in the USA.
So, is all the insecurity and pain worth a couple of decades of cheap stuff?
That's *still* better than the journalists. (rim shot)
Cheers!
Oh well by all means, let's end free trade and go back to what started the Republican party, protectionism.
I would be interested to know exactly how these six in 10 Republicans believe free trade has been bad for these United States. Especially since it hasn't been implemented on a wide scale in a very, very long time. But heck Republicans hear boogey man stories about the mean Chinese that 'hate America' and are trying to 'get us' with lead toys or some such so let's just run back to protectionism. We all know that works so well....
You haven't been here very long, but you have been here long enough that you should realize that close to 90% of us despise NAFTA, GATT, and WTO. There are a few very vocal supporters of 'free trade' here, some out of pure ignorance, but a couple of them have a genuine devious agenda.
Naaah. Computer technology, the internet, and changes in the law contributed too.
Cheers!
Another Look at Outsourcing (Vanity).
Cheers!
Sure, but to a much lesser degree. In the 80's, Reagan could have done what the Europeans did and raised taxes to support the nanny state. Instead, he passed one of the greatest tax cuts in history.
The fact that Americans were now able to keep more of the money they make allowed for the growth of 401K's, IRA's and so on. His tax cuts also created the capital necessary to fund the innovation leading to the tech revolution of the 90's. John Chambers of Cisco Systems credits the Reagan tax cuts, and the rebuilding of the military, for the incredible growth of technology and the resulting increases in productivity in the US. We've created 25 million new jobs since 1994 while the EU created just 2 million. Tells you everything you need to know.
No he cannot, because there aren't any anymore.
no, that would be production and innovation.
The problem lately is that the time and investment needed to get into a lot of different high-paying fields, is that the technology changes rapidly, AND that companies would rather engage in wage arbitrage rather than update existing employee's skills.
The upshot is twofold:
You can pay big $$ (if a US citizen; many foreign students get sponsored by their home countries) for a degree which might not pay at all (your specialization went out of favor while you were in school; by the time it is hot again, your learning is out of date), or you can hit at the hot time and have five, eight, or ten years, before which you need to start over in the next hot thing, or get outsourced.
And when you enter the new field, you have to compete against others even to get the trainging; you have to earn a living and may have a family to support, so you usually can't do full-time day studies; and when you get out you are competing both against lower-wage foreigners and against people just out of school who are younger *and* cheaper than you; and your prior training and experience is often seen as a liability, not an asset.
In the short term, good for the bottom line of the execs of the businesses, bad for most everyone else in this country.
Cheers!
It depends? Are the problems caused, or largely influenced, aided, and abetted, by dint of a particular government policy, or a set of them?
Cheers!
Yes, indirectly.
It used to be that when a bank made a home loan, the bank carried the loan, and the associated risk, on its own ledger.
This gave the bank more incentive to be circumspect about lending money, to require a larger down payment, more evidence of income and likelihood you would *keep* your job, and the like.
However it happened, the banks discovered that they could 'sell' mortgages to those who wanted a guaranteed stream of income, or more or less guaranteed. As long as the banks maintained their stringent lending standards, that worked ok.
Then some over-educated cretins decided that they could use data analysis to combine pools of mortgages, leavening good mortgages with a few bad ones, to dilute the risk, and sell the bundled securities to even more customers -- insurance agencies, hedge funds, pension funds, overseas banks, and the like.
Once this became widespread, two things happened. 1) The banks realized, "Hey! It's not on OUR books anymore! We don't have to be as stringent in vetting the loans!"
2) The banks, mortgage brokers, and others, began to realize significant chunks of change by *processing* and *selling* mortgages to others, rather than just holding individual mortgage loans on their books to maturity.
The combination of 1) and 2) led to pressure on the banks to increase cash flow by increasing the 'churn', the rate at which they underwrote and sold mortgages, at the same time as the bank's own risk in making questionable loans decreased.
As it happened, this coincided with the 40-year lows in interest rates following the 9-11 attacks.
The result was a housing bubble.
The REASONS it didn't go on forever, are that the bubble drove prices up to the point where even "liars loans" couldn't provide enough rationale to float the loans; that is, the "margin of safety" (price appreciation) which allowed the liars loans to be made slowed down.
All the people who bought, had (and interest rates stabilized so the re-financing slowed down, too); and finally, the formulae and methodology used to price the risks inherent in sub-prime mortgages were based on data from before the bubble, when the riskiest loans in the bundle were much better than they were at the top of the bubble.
So the bubble finally ran into a pin and it is somewhere between deflating and popping.
The problem loans would NOT HAVE BEEN MADE back in the days when the banks carried the loans and the risks on their own books. But the banks DID sell the packages of mortgages to a number of foreign banks, especially in Europe, some in Asia; so in a sense the sub-prime problem loans WERE enabled by free trade.
Cheers!
There are technological, cultural, financial, and legal barriers in place in the 70's that aren't there now.
Just chanting "free trade did it"TM is an oversimplification.
Cheers!
That's for the companies to decide, unless you want a centrally-planned economy. It worked great for the USSR.
Moron
Everyone in the world thinks Japan is a rich country except for you
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