Posted on 01/24/2014 6:36:50 AM PST by 1rudeboy
“We’ve outsourced our manufacturing and much of our pollution, but some of it is blowing back across the Pacific to haunt us.”
So says University of California scientist Steve Davis. Smog from Chinese factories has already saturated cities like Beijing, where residents go about in surgical masks, and crossed the East China Sea to foul the air of Korea and Japan. Now China’s smog is coming to America’s West.
Among the pollutants wafting their way over the Pacific, says the Guardian, is black carbon, which is “linked to cancer, emphysema and heart and lung diseases,” and travels “huge distances on global winds known as ‘westerlies.’” Davis is one of a team of U.S. and Chinese researchers whose report has been published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. As the Chinese factories fouling Asia’s air arose to meet the demands of Western consumers, says Beijing, the West should help pay the cost of cleaning up their polluted and poisoned environment.
Seems that, despite the academic consensus that free trade is win-win for all, free trade is not free.
Great nations that have risen to global power by protecting their manufacturing, like Britain in the early 19th century, have begun their relative decline when they embraced free trade. Between 1870 and 1914, protectionist America and Germany both shoved Britain aside.
Since Y2K, China, which protects its industrial base by keeping its currency artificially cheap, has surged past Italy, Britain, France, Germany, and Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. And they are gaining steadily on us. Free trade appears to be the policy of fading nations.
Perhaps it is time for a profit and loss statement of its costs and benefits. Undeniably, free trade has been a bonanza for the top 1 percent and many among our top 10 percent. As U.S. manufacturers shut down scores of thousands of U.S. factories to finance new plants in Asia, their production costs plummeted. Wages and benefits for Asians were, and are still, but a fraction of those of American workers.
Health, safety, and environmental standards were in some cases almost nonexistent. The eight-story garment factory in Bangladesh that collapsed in April, killing 1,100 workers, mostly women, and injuring another 2,500, would never have passed a U.S. building inspection.
After having shifted production overseas and dramatically lowered costs, U.S. transnationals saw a surge in profits. These were used to push corporate salaries into the stratosphere, increase dividends to shareholders, and keep the Washington lobbyists working the Hill day and night for fast track and free trade. And the lifestyle of our corporate elites changed. Where their fathers walked sooty factory floors in smokestack towns in World War II, these masters of the universe fly Gulfstream Vs to Davos and Dubai to dine with titled Europeans, Saudi princes and Chinese billionaires.
These are America’s winners from free trade. The losers? Middle Americans. The average U.S. family has not seen a rise in real wages in 40 years. This is directly traceable to the loss of more than one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. And that loss, that deindustrialization of America, is directly tied to the $10 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I. Writers who celebrate how U.S. imports have risen in this month or that year almost never mention the trade deficit for this month or that year. Perhaps that is because the United States has not run a trade surplus in four decades, whereas, in the first 70 years of the 20th century, we never ran a trade deficit. Trade surpluses add to GDP; trade deficits subtract from GDP.
And when in a company town the company closes the factory, the town often dies. And all the little satellite businesses—bars, diners, food stores, pharmacies—that rose around the factory, they die, too. The tombstones of countless dead towns across America should read: Killed by Free Trade. Tenured economists on college campuses call this “creative destruction.”
The stagnant wages of two generations of U.S. workers also help to explain the crisis of Social Security and Medicare. For, as workers’ wages fail to rise, or fall, so, too, do their contributions in payroll taxes. If, as Simpson-Bowles contends, our largest entitlement programs are heading for insolvency, free trade played a lead role in that American tragedy. And where is the liberal morality in passing laws to ensure U.S. workers a living wage and clean and safe conditions, and then, through fast track and free trade, signaling their bosses that they can evade these laws by shutting factories here, moving their plants to Asia, paying coolie wages, and subjecting Asian workers to conditions that would earn a U.S. industrialist a tour in Leavenworth?
Whatever happens from free trade is what should happen, free traders say. As Dr. Pangloss explained to Candide, whatever happens, happens for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
Sure.
I would argue that 10% of anything cannot have a huge affect. It is like the Smoot Hawley lie. Smoot Hawley is the poster child of Free Trade. Well it didn't have much of an impact at all Why? because trade was only 5% of GDP, so it mathematically could not have a huge impact. We made our own stuff back in the 1930's the country hadn't bought into the gloBULLism that today's America has fallen for.
You're talking of course about the lowering of the trade tariffs in the 1960's. That was the government intervention that caused this.
Raising the import tariffs by 10% would fund a $1500 per worker individual income tax cut. Of course you could use the funds to cut corporate taxes if you prefer. That would be a lot more money in American citizens hands to spend in the local economy.
Thanks to the lowered tariff, we now tax domestic producers much higher than we tax foreign producers. Talk about your "hostile environments".
You're talking of course about the lowering of the trade tariffs in the 1960's. That was the government intervention that caused this.
Raising the import tariffs by 10% would fund a $1500 per worker individual income tax cut. Of course you could use the funds to cut corporate taxes if you prefer. That would be a lot more money in American citizens hands to spend in the local economy.
Thanks to the lowered tariff, we now tax domestic producers much higher than we tax foreign producers. Talk about your "hostile environments".
Export Dollars + import poverty = Free Trade
i notice you didn't want to dwell on post 72 and instead are now trying to deflect.
OK then better question: How many Gub'ment bailout tax payer dollars went to each of auto union workers in the GM and Chrysler?
And Remember that money was used to save union jobs!
Re: http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/2014/01/24/the-us-chamber-of-commerce-versus-america/?subscriber=1
Thanks.. Good link !
you would argue that but then when you consider the multi-billion dollar taxpayer funded bailout of the auto industry to and I quote "save union jobs" you would look silly doing so.
If 'free trade' existed then our factories and know-how would have been exported to Germany, Japan and China and we would have lost WW II. Thanks to protectionism we won WW II.
Real Free Trade has been practiced successfully for centuries on a bilateral or multilateral basis. It is trade between equal or nearly partners. Canada trading wood pulp to the United States for paper goods. Chile sending grapes to the United States in January and the United States sending grapes to Chile in July. Japan sending us automobiles and we sending them wheat.
The old British Commonwealth of Nations, Benelux, the European Community, and others were all highly successful examples of mutually beneficial free trade.
Like every other institution, the left and the crony capitalist GOP perverted it into Kool-Aid drinking free trade.
Mexico, which lacks basic sanitary standards, has no business being an equal trading partner with the United States, which requires them. China, where pollution and worker abuse are a way of doing business, has no business being treated as an equal trading partner like Japan, which has similar or even more stringent standards that the United States in these matters. Greece, where fiscal irresponsibility is the norm, has no business being treated the same as highly efficient Germany. I could go on, but you get the idea.
Free trade associations are only successful when practiced between member states with similar standards and values. Allowing an outsider into the group before they meet such standards is not going to make them magically adopt them, but it will make the collective weaker by adding more free riders.
hahah of course I notice you gloss over the huge uptick in GPA after such happened and the fact that Government descended on manufacturing with more and more EPA and health and safety regs and more and more compliance red tape and the unions demanded more and more beneifts like huge retirement packages and Health insurance and the Big Three car manufacturers pooh poohed the idea that they were in the car making business but instead in the "money making" business.
You are akin to the geniuses during the polio scare who claimed polio was caused by Ice Cream because the cases reported increased significantly during the summer months when more Ice Cream was sold.
Oh and BTW that very sentiment you posted is straight out of the Union propaganda playbook!
I buy Ford.
And Unionista central va: "Labor is just one component in manufacturing, one of the smallest too."
OK so which one of you is wrong?
Perhaps it is time for a profit and loss statement of its costs and benefits. Undeniably, free trade has been a bonanza for the top 1 percent and many among our top 10 percent.
These are America’s winners from free trade. The losers? Middle Americans. The average U.S. family has not seen a rise in real wages in 40 years.
We are both right. Nothing could be done tax wise or regulation wise to compete with $.25/hr labor rates. My argument is that labor is such a small component of manufacturing cost using first world labor would increase cost but only a few cents on the dollar.. All of which would and could be offset by eliminating income taxes and reduced social spending. It would also a matter of national defense because I consider the industrial base the key to maintaining our freedom.
And you think this is because of Free Trade?
No, not your imagination at all. The implication that you would only post an article with which you agree is somewhat disturbing.
I wish you would tell that to those of us who are find of quoting Marx.
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