The re-election of Barack Obama hasn't done anything to make more jobs available to Americans, and there is no indication that it will. America now has 23 million people who want a full-time job but can't find one. Posted on 01/23/2013 7:24:00 AM PST by Kaslin
The re-election of Barack Obama hasn't done anything to make more jobs available to Americans, and there is no indication that it will. America now has 23 million people who want a full-time job but can't find one.
Obama doesn't think American citizens or businessmen create jobs. His Jobs Czar, Jeffrey Immelt, recently said on a television interview referring to China, where he has outsourced General Electric's light bulb plants, "state-run Communism may not be your cup of tea, but their government works."
In his first presidential debate last year, Obama claimed that passage of free trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Columbia would create U.S. jobs because they would double our exports and promote his goal of "a seamless regional economy." One year after Congress passed these trade deals, exports to Korea have declined by more than $1.2 billion in comparison to the same months the year before, while imports have risen.
The official U.S. International Trade Commission admits that the Korea agreement will cause significant job losses, not just in low-end industries but also make a victim of the electronic equipment manufacturing industry. The Economic Policy Institute, a leftist think tank, estimates the Korea agreement will cost us 159,000 more jobs over the next five years.
The trade pact's 1,000 pages of rules and regulations will be enforced by foreign tribunals. Ron Paul calls this "a sneaky form of international preemptions, undermining the critical checks and balances and freedoms established by the U.S. Constitution."
Our annual trade deficit with China has increased to $290 billion. Our exports to China were up 6.4 percent over the previous year, but imports increased by 6.5 percent.
In 2002, we granted Communist China Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR), which is a fancy name for free trade, and the United States has lost an average of 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month ever since. U.S. employment dropped 2.6 percent because of a combination of outsourcing and absence of job growth that would have taken place without the trade agreement, according to a new study by the Federal Reserve's Justin Pierce and Yale's Peter Schott.
Mainstream economists have been stuck for years in the notion that any attack on "free trade" is heretical, but finally their dogma is cracking. Even the Washington Post now acknowledges that "trade liberalization" with China is a big reason for the decline of U.S. manufacturing jobs.
Forbes Magazine published an article titled "America's Manufacturing Crisis: Finally Harvard Gets It." What academics finally "get" is that it is, indeed, a disaster for America to lose our manufacturing base specifically because that causes us to lose our "ability to innovate."
The theorists held onto their out-of-date free-trade theory despite the loss of millions of outsourced jobs, despite 42,000 U.S. factories permanently closed, and despite the loss of high blue-collar wages that could support a family. But our loss of innovation is finally waking them up.
Most people recognize that America's prosperity and high standard of living depend on our remarkable power and skill of innovation produced by manufacturing. They should read Alexander Hamilton's great 1791 treatise on the importance of manufacturing.
Harvard management professors Gary P. Pisano and Willy C. Shih emphasize the effect on innovation in their new book "Producing Prosperity: Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaissance." Another useful book is "Freedom's Forge" by Arthur Herman, which proves that a manufacturing base is essential for national security, and we couldn't have won World War II without it.
Our manufacturing base was what enabled the "arsenal of democracy" in 1944 to produce a war plane every five minutes, 150 tons of steel every hour and eight aircraft carriers a month. After World War II, our manufacturing base caused an incredible rise in our standard of living, bringing electricity and indoor plumbing to most homes and good wages that built a middle class to enable blue-collar workers to support a fulltime homemaker to raise their children.
We've been told that the new normal is for America to be an economy based on providing services instead of products. The trouble is it's pretty hard to export services such as waiters and dry cleaners; we can only export things we make.
The main defect with free trade is that, in the words of the old cliche, it takes two to tango. America steps naively onto the dance floor, but Communist China won't dance.
China protects and subsidizes its home industries and products, forces foreign-owned plants to give China their patents and trade secrets, cheats us with shoddy and dangerous exports, manipulates its currency to keep it artificially low, operates a large network of technology spies in the United States and pays slave-labor wages to its workers.
The 21st century is so complex and advanced any ideas pre WWII are hopelessly outdated and defunct.
The world is so integrated globalism and free trade are a forgone conclusion.
Any beliefs since the founding of the US must bend and adjust to the new order of things. ie. sustainable development - free trade - agenda 21.
Funny thing is all these 21 century plans and integration were well developed and laid out pre and just post WWII.
Many authors and academics and politicians have openly spoken of them.
Gatt, Nafta and Cafta were laid out in the open as policy in the 50’s.
Anyone who does their homework can find this stuff out.
Even at the bottom of the current recession - 2009 and 2010 - the USA out-produced China by $100 billion.
To put this in perspective, China and the USA are now roughly equal in manufacturing output.
However, China uses EIGHT times more manufacturing workers than the USA to produce the same output!
Re: “The country is short 20 Million jobs.”
Speaking of “Free Trade”.....
Since 1995 America has “IMPORTED” at least 20 million new completely LEGAL foreign workers.
Most of those foreign workers have limited skills and limited education, which has destroyed the wage base in manufacturing.
Well, hell, that settles it -- that's who I want to partner up with!!
We owe these policies to the faceless, nameless "Them" who, gaining intellectual ascendancy over the intellectually weak Bush clan, and "Poppy" Bush over most of the Reagan Administration through his patronage deal with Ronny and the Reaganauts, outsourced and trashed every industrial capacity in sight, laid waste our manufacturing workforce and crushed wages generally by playing outsourcing, "comparative advantage", and green-card games. They've had a free hand since about 1981, when Reagan came into office, to push "internationalization" and offshoring. Now serious people are beginning to count the cost, which has been fantastic. Wonder how many "T's" of GNP we've given up since George H.W. Bush became Vice-President, and James Baker became Reagan's chief of staff?
It wasn't true during the 1890's, the 1900's, the 1920's, or the 1930's. We dusted them back then, too.
I don’t waste my time with folks who pull quotes out of context. Think “developed world” - as well as WW2. And think WW1 while you’re at it. In other words, none of that has any relevance to today because MORE IS DIFFERENT than is the same.
It is good the free traitors were not around in the 1930’s and 40’s. Europe would be a NAzi Empire and Asia would be under the Rising Sun. My guess China and Japan(and or South Korea) will be at it soon. On that day this great experiment with the selling out of America ends.. Can’t happen soon enough.
Unions are dead. 95% of the manufacturing jobs exported were non union to begin with.
Free Trade is to the Republicans as Global Warming is to the Democrats. Both hoaxes and ruses.
That’s an absurd extrapolation, but go ahead, think yourself smarter on macro economics than Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sarah Palin, Larry Kudlow, Ronald Reagan - go ahead you genius you.....
Bump!
Perfect description.
Yep, the other side of the coin.
In-sourcing cheap labor vs. Outsourcing for cheap labor.
In the long run cheap labor is rarely cheap. Most of the newly arrived immigrants voted for Obama and want to be paid now.
Funny how blind the Free Traders and the GOPe are. (same thing).
China leads America in manufacturing output.
And is growing.
The total value of China's manufactured goods has never exceeded the USA.
The numbers for 2012 have not been released yet.
It's certainly possible China took the lead in 2012.
However, as I noted, one factory worker in the USA produces the same dollar value as EIGHT factory workers in China.
Not sure I agree with you.
The chart I saw (sorry I do not have a link, just going from memory) had China now leading.
China is leading, and China’s lead is now growing.
China is becoming a threat. We need to bring back manufacturing. Now.
I’ve spent an hour researching the issue, and clearly, 100% of the reports I find support your position.
I based my statement on a report and chart I thought I saw in Investors Business Daily in December.
Searched the IBD archive, but no luck.
From memory, USA was just above $2.1 trillion in 2011, China was just above $2.0 trillion.
In the past, there have been many heated trade debates on the correct method of converting foreign currencies into constant dollars.
However, I don’t recall that being mentioned in the article I read.
Thanks for bringing me up to date.
That’s the green colored glasses you’re wearing as well as the belief that any dichotomy you can think of must be true.
Argumentum ad majoritum? (give or take a Latin vowel)
Well, that’s only one of my argumentums, one I think you could understand. And even so, that’s not necessarily wrong, considering my majoritum.
Meanwhile, yours is argumentum ad ignarus and arumentum ad populum and argumentum ad filium.....aid I’ll take my majoritum over your filium and populm and certainly your ignaurs anyday.
Meanwhile, you show a total lack of any concpet of cause and effect unless it bites you on your butt. The simple mind gravitates towards trade protectionism, because it can point to a specific job and say “See, there, see THAT job, THAT job is gone due to free trade” without ever realizing that it was the natural course of human events, many decisions made in freedom, that switched that job with ten more that you are not aware of. And being unfamiliar with Adam Smith, you cannot even concieve of.
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