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 ...
If we have to ask a third party to enforce something, or if another country can ‘legally’ block us in the WTO - both scenarios are true - than that is a loss of sovereignty.
n: I'm supposed to worry about that? Worry that foreign investors have a stake in maintaining our economy in good shape?
My line above, underlined, was a summary of a long-winded answer to your question,
The 1% that have Sub-prime problem loans are because of "free trade"? Did they import that house from China or something?
In other words, "free trade" (this time, in financial derivatives) *did* in fact influence the sub-prime housing market in the U.S.
Cheers!
These aren't necessarily contradictions; there are different risks inherent to each condition.
If China's currency gets too low, they face inflation and high unemployment, if it has been held artificially low for too long.
Jim Jubak on msn.com has a good article on this, btw.
And a low dollar is good for our large corporations who export overseas, but not for most of the employees.
Cheers!
Looks suspiciously like someone with a vested interest, at least on the outside.
If Toddster would present a cogent argument from first principles to back up his views, it would tend to increase the credibility of his position.
Cheers!
That would be true except for two things.
1) People often pursue irrational self-interest such as smoking, not wearing seatbelts, going through life 40 pounds or more overweight, etc. (I choose these examples because they are not controversial in the context of this thread.)
2) The societal costs of irrational self interest does affect other people considerable, giving them incentive and in some cases the duty to react.
Libertarianism is based on an idealized version of human interactions.
Cheers!
Here are my principles to radically lower cost and improve quality of the higher education product:
- Commoditize the knowledge and skills
- Unbundle services
- Eliminate or reduce unnecessary requirements
- Provide standardized assessments of student outcomes
- Use communications technology to reduce labor costs and physical plant requirements
I am wondering if either they are in effect playing "chicken" with the Chinese over the peg of the yuan to the dollar and the limited float, or deliberately doing this in order to instill problems in China when the yuan suddenly *does* have to revalue.
(Recall that W. does hold a Harvard MBA.)
The communists haven't been through boom-and-busts yet, they don't know how to handle them.
Cheers!
In other words, the risk of the bundled mortgages was defined in a time of slowly rising home prices with sensible loans; but over time the bundles reflected both highly rising prices and senseless loans.
Something had to give...
Cheers!
And Wal-Mart sells food, too, including Chinese tilapia, for example.
Cheers!
bump
“That ugly reality has resulted in closed factories, shuttered up store fronts on Main Street and large big box stores selling cheap goods from third world countries using slave labor or worse yet, poisoned dog and cat foods, toys containing high lead contents that we don’t allow our manufacturers to use but mostly government regulations that strangle our manufacturing base while we make our enemies rich enough to be building up their military to challenge our military superiority one day.”
Oh, that was so well put. Bravo.
As for people acting irrationally, in most cases they should have the liberty to do so as well. I'm not much of a libertarian . . . I'm a free-market conservative. Ronald Reagan observed that the two travel along the same path.
“As with most subject, it is ignorance which spawns fear. Too many do not understand the laws of economics, so they fear them instead. What makes prices go up and down is a mystery to them, so it’s treated like voodoo.”
You insult us all and make us to be a bunch of dummies. We aren’t. The theory of the laws of economics are not what is happening now in practice. We are being screwed daily by these trade agreements, and most of us know it. It’s unfair trade, not free trade, but you seem to miss that point. Maybe it’s you that is the dummy, while acting like an intellectual elitist.
Quite frankly I'm tired of the "free traders (free for every country BUT us)as well as the "open (to all intruders) borders" crowd.
They are also some of the same people espousing freedom for everyone except the American people, American taxpayers and most of all American security and prosperity, at the expense of cheap goods and cheap labor (the cheap goods are being made by slaves and the cheap labor are our new underclass "residents.")
I also am not in favor of completely off-shoring critical manufacturing capability - the ability to feed the machine of war must be maintained in country.
“Also 4.6% unemployment and a $13.5 trillion GDP.”
And a trillion dollar trade deficit.
The WTO can't stop us from doing anything that we want to do.
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