Posted on 09/17/2003 7:06:29 AM PDT by Theodore R.
The slow awakening of George W.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: September 17, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2003 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Last July, U.S. Trade Representative Bob Zoellick delivered a halftime pep talk to dispirited globalists, thrown on the defensive by the hemorrhaging of U.S. manufacturing jobs.
"What ... a surprise," Zoellick railed at his troops, "to see that the proponents of [free trade] ... have so often abandoned the debate to the economic isolationists and purveyors of fright and retreat."
But by September, Zoellick's own boss seemed to be drifting toward the camp of the "economic isolationists and purveyors of fright."
At a rally in Ohio, which has lost 160,000 manufacturing jobs since mid-2000, President Bush railed: "We've lost thousands of manufacturing jobs because production moved overseas. ... America must send a message overseas – say, look, we expect there to be a fair playing field when it comes to trade."
Yes, friends, at long last, we have their attention.
What's behind this radically revised presidential rhetoric? It is this: U.S. manufacturing jobs are vanishing, and unless he turns it around, Bush's presidency may vanish along with them.
The numbers are breathtaking. Manufacturing jobs have been disappearing for 37 straight months. Not since the Depression have we lost production jobs three years in a row. Since 2000, one in every six manufacturing jobs, 2.7 million, has disappeared. These jobs paid an average wage of $54,000.
Unfortunately for President Bush, while he has a good heart, he was horribly miseducated at Harvard. He simply cannot comprehend that it is free-trade globalism that is destroying U.S. manufacturing jobs, and may yet destroy his presidency.
The serial killer of manufacturing jobs is imports, which are now equal to almost 15 percent of GDP, four times the level they held between 1860 and 1960. What has caused this flood of imports? The trade deals that people like Robert Zoellick negotiate and George W. Bush celebrates.
Consider the numbers.
In July alone, the United States exported $86.1 billion in goods and services. But we imported $126.5 billion, for a trade deficit of $40.4 billion. The total trade deficit for 2003 is estimated at between $480 billion and $500 billion. But the deficit in goods will run closer to $550 billion.
The president's father and Bill Clinton contended that every $1 billion in exports created 20,000 jobs. Thus, a $550 billion trade deficit kills 11 million production and manufacturing jobs.
Say goodbye to blue-collar America.
What is the Bush prescription for curing this metastasizing cancer? In Ohio, he declared, "See, we in America believe we can compete with anybody, just so long as the rules are fair, and we intend to keep the rules fair."
How, Mr. President?
Consider the nation that runs the largest trade surplus with us. In July, we bought $13.4 billion in goods from China and sold China $2.1 billion. U.S. imports from China this year should come in around $160 billion, and U.S. exports to China at $25 billion.
We will thus buy 10 percent of the entire GDP of China, while she buys 0.25 percent of the GDP of the United States. Is this "fair trade"? But how does Bush propose to close this exploding deficit? How can he?
Where a U.S. manufacturing worker may cost $53,000 a year, a factory in China – with $53,000 and using the same machinery and technology as a U.S. factory – can employ 25 reliable, intelligent, hardworking Chinese at $1 an hour.
If you force U.S. businessmen to pay kids who sweep the floor a $5-an-hour minimum wage, while their rivals pay highly skilled Chinese workers $1 an hour, how do you square that with the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection of the laws?
Does the president, when he goes on about keeping "the rules fair," mean he will insist that China start paying its skilled workers $25 an hour and subject their factories to the same payroll taxes, wage-and-hour laws, OSHA inspections and environmental rules as ours?
Beijing will tell him to go fly a kite, Made in China.
It is absurd to think we can force foreign nations to accept U.S. rules and regulations on production and American standards on wages and benefits. And why should foreign nations comply, when – with their present policies and laws – they are looting our industrial base and walking away with our inheritance?
The men who have custody today of what was once the most awesome manufacturing base the world had ever seen are ideologues, impervious to argument or evidence. Like the socialists of Eastern Europe, zealots like Zoellick are beyond retraining. They are uneducable. They have to go. The sooner they do, the sooner we can get about rebuilding the self-sufficient and sovereign America they gave away.
There should ALWAYS have been a much more stringent "performance assessment tied to salary" component for Zoellick at USTR and when he was at State in the 1990s going up against Japan. The more this guy got on the plane to Asia, the more he and his ilk negotiated, why the more US industry lost ground and more markets were kept close, the more his salary should have been docked. Based on the poor figures, the guy would have been earning $12,500 per annum at the end of the Bush Administration if I had my way.
That rational-choice theorist twerp could prattle out the most excellent sounding, high flying trade agreements in flowing legalese, and stroke himself silly about American Victories On Procedurual Issues Only, yet at the end of the day, whole American industries and strategic technologies were gutted because of no enforcement procedures, and the Japanese laughed behind the guy's back the moment his United flight was wheels up at Narita Airport. Those of us left behind who had to live there, heard it all upon his departures.
Zoellick is highly intelligent, and highly naive. He is useless. I don't know why Bush brought him on in the first place with his dismal record of failure (but hey, he negotiated some "GREAT" multilateral agreements!!)
It's deja vu all over again. Domestic issues are a Bush family weakness.
Williams has delusions of grandeur and is NOT subject to ANY "open market" in academia.
It isn't a speech. It's a written article.
However, I won't necessarily argue the point. Perhaps my response written on the fly was deficient in itself.
But I still think the way it was stunk.
Later...
And you can throw in that Pat was right about foreign entanglements bringing war to our shores, accepting gay and abortion practices is destructive to America, and China should not be a 'most favored trading nation'. You know Pat is right, when Goebbel's big lie name-calling is the retort.
This is leading to some employment opportunities waitressing and the like. The trends though aren't good. As I pointed out, much is being automated. Go to a McDonald's sometimes and carefully observe. They are soon going to be able to employ less people. Everything, from the menus, to the soda dispensors are going electronic, taking away the low skilled job.
The restaurant industry already has created an automated hamburger flipper. Cost is the only thing keeping it out of widespread usage now. It actually flips burgers on a grill with multiple burgers, probes them for temperature, sterilizing the probe each time, before checking the next. Once actual production models are starting to be made, 5 years perhaps, those jobs are gone. No point in hiring 3 hamburger flippers, with workman's comp potential, salary demands, when you can get a faster safer job done by machinery.
There still will be some workers there to actually hand you your food, but the jobs will shrink. There will be a rise in teen-age unemployment, when jobs teens traditionally take are cheaper to do through automation. Retail is what is left, but the teen agers will be competing with 20-25 year old, non college material types for those jobs.
I am not blaming anybody for this. It is progress, but there are large potential consequences.
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Bush has one thing going for him. A room full of people were able to blow up a pile of ragheads using pushbutton warfare while high school minded members of the public cheered. Meanwhile, an invasion continues across out Souther borders financed by our social service system. He issues peoclamations about how America must share its wealth with the world. Bush does little or nothing right. If the Clintons were doing this crap you and others would be howling for impeachment.
I'm sure they are. Why do you think Bush is a big government, pro-tariff, pro-farm subsidies, "compassionate" conservative? He's not stupid. I understand why Bush is a trade protectionist in practice. I also know he personally realizes how economically dumb trade protectionism is. I'm all for political expediency though. He's a great President.
Neat question. (I haven't cheated---did he mention China?)
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