Posted on 02/15/2006 10:42:45 AM PST by SirLinksalot
Our hollow prosperity
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Posted: February 15, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern
PATRICK BUCHANAN
© 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc.
Now that the U.S. trade deficit for 2005 has come in at $726 billion, the fourth straight all-time record, a question arises.
What constitutes failure for a free-trade policy? Or is there no such thing? Is free trade simply right no matter the results?
Last year, the United States ran a $202 billion trade deficit with China, the largest ever between two nations. We ran all-time record trade deficits with OPEC, the European Union, Japan, Canada and Latin America. The $50 billion deficit with Mexico was the largest since NAFTA passed and also the largest in history.
When NAFTA was up for a vote in 1993, the Clintonites and their GOP fellow-travelers said it would grow our trade surplus, raise Mexico's standard of living and reduce illegal immigration.
None of this happened. Indeed, the opposite occurred. Mexico's standard of living is lower than it was in 1993, the U.S. trade surplus has vanished, and America is being invaded. Mexico is now the primary source of narcotics entering the United States.
Again, when can we say a free-trade policy has failed?
The Bushites point proudly to 4.6 million jobs created since May 2003, a 4.7 percent unemployment rate and low inflation.
Unfortunately, conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts and analysts Charles McMillion and Ed Rubenstein have taken a close look at the figures and discovered that the foundation of the Bush prosperity rests on rotten timber.
The entire job increase since 2001 has been in the service sector – credit intermediation, health care, social assistance, waiters, waitresses, bartenders, etc. – and state and local government.
But, from January 2001 to January 2006, the United States lost 2.9 million manufacturing jobs, 17 percent of all we had. Over the past five years, we have suffered a net loss in goods-producing jobs.
"The decline in some manufacturing sectors has more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing than with a super-economy that is 'the envy of the world,'" writes Roberts.
Communications equipment lost 43 percent of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37 percent ... The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30 percent. Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25 percent of its workforce.
How did this happen? Imports. The U.S. trade deficit in advanced technology jobs in 2005 hit an all-time high.
As for the "knowledge industry" jobs that were going to replace blue-collar jobs, it's not happening. The information sector lost 17 percent of all its jobs over the last five years.
In the same half-decade, the U.S. economy created only 70,000 net new jobs in architecture and engineering, while hundreds of thousands of American engineers remain unemployed.
If we go back to when Clinton left office, one finds that, in five years, the United States has created a net of only 1,054,000 private-sector jobs, while government added 1.1 million. But as many new private sector jobs are not full-time, McMillion reports, "the country ended 2005 with fewer private sector hours worked than it had in January 2001."
This is an economic triumph?
Had the United States not created the 1.4 million new jobs it did in health care since January 2001, we would have nearly half a million fewer private-sector jobs than when Bush first took the oath.
Ed Rubenstein of ESR Research Economic Consultants looks at the wage and employment figures and discovers why, though the Bushites were touting historic progress, 55 percent of the American people in a January poll rated the Bush economy only "fair" or "poor."
Not only was 2005's growth of 2 million jobs a gain of only 1.5 percent, anemic compared to the average 3.5 percent at this stage of other recoveries, the big jobs gains are going to immigrants.
Non-Hispanic whites, over 70 percent of the labor force, saw only a 1 percent employment increase in 2005. Hispanics, half of whom are foreign born, saw a 4.7 percent increase. As Hispanics will work for less in hospitals and hospices, and as waiters and waitresses, they are getting the new jobs.
But are not wages rising? Nope. When inflation is factored in, the Economic Policy Institute reports, "real wages fell by 0.5 percent over the last 12 months after falling 0.7 percent the previous 12 months."
If one looks at labor force participation – what share of the 227 million potential workers in America have jobs – it has fallen since 2002 for whites, blacks and Hispanics alike. Non-Hispanic whites are down to 63.4 percent, but black Americans have fallen to 57.7 percent.
What is going on? Hispanic immigrants are crowding out black Americans in the unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled job market. And millions of our better jobs are being lost to imports and outsourcing.
The affluent free-traders, whose wealth resides in stocks in global companies, are enriching themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens and sacrificing the American worker on the altar of the Global Economy.
None dare call it economic treason.
So the answer to this controlled economy is to make it even more of a controlled economy?
OTOH, from colonial time on, mortgages have been what most people have used, when they BOUGHT their homes. All up and down New England, you can see small, round ivory discs on the newel posts of VERY old houses. I bet you don't know why.
The reason those ivory discs were placed into 150 year old newel posts, in these older homes, is because the owners proudly placed them there, to show that they had PAID OFF THEIR MORTAGES! Usually, this took most of their lives to do and they were proud of the accomplishment.
"Where is the value of the dollar decreasing?"
At the grocery store, the gas pump, the real estate closing table, etc., etc....
How the hell to corporations get subsidies to move offshore? Please name them.
LOL
"One of them was a close relative of Ayman al Zawahri, while a second was bomb building expert Midhat Mursi, who, like al Zawahri (who has $25 million reward on him), had a $5 million reward on his head. Another of the dead foreigners was Abdul Rehman al-Misri al-Maghribi, a son-in-law of Zawahiri and in charge of the al Qaeda's Information War operations. Another of dead was Abu Obaidah al Misri, who was in charge of terrorist operations just across the border, in Afghanistan's Kunar province."
"Initially, al Qaeda tried to spin the attack as a complete failure, saying that only civilians were in the building, that 18 were killed, and that this included women and children."
Whoa...that's what pat was saying also...the woman and children bit.
Go back to any point over the last 35 years, and you'll probably find that at any given time the president's approval rating was inversely correlated to the retail price of gasoline.
Tell me, did Clinton have to go out and preach how great the economy was in 1998?
Please cite me specific measures by which the economy was better in 1998 than it is today.
Your suggestion that government owns "most" of the housing is abusrd. Please provide a link to back it up. As for your main point, once again you seem to be saying that free markets are no good, and then list as example cases where the government goes against free markets. The logic of that totally escapes me.
I'm happy, are you? I bet you are. :-)
If only you REALLY knew and understood any history! *sigh*
If you're happy and you know it clap your hand...pat...pat.
Transactions that are freely entered into?
What a waste of oxygen.
"And as proof you offer our $12 trillion economy, (twice the size of our nearest competitor) growing at 4% a year with a low unemployment rate of just 4.7%, populated by 140 million workers with an all time high net worth of $51 trillion. Our rubes are getting rich while our far craftier counterparts, in the EU and Japan, are mired in deflation, moribund economic growth and high unemployment. No wonder they can't attract any investment capital. Hey, at least they have trade surpluses! LOL"
For the record, I am not an isolationist. I am all for free trade with responsible nations that do not repress the rights of their citizens. We have a word for those types of nations... Allies. China is not our ally. Would you have us trade freely with Iran?
I am not in favor of providing our enemies with the capital necessary to arm themselves or impose cultural changes outside their borders.
The Soviet Union was toppled because we and our allies refused to trade with them. I am simply stating that we should take the same tack in regards to our economic policies with China and other repressive regimes.
BTW - Someone here had the nerve to refute the fact that there is only a certain total amount of capital available at any given time. Care to explain further?
"But is the FR about how to get rich quick or about the welfare of American Republic? You can get very rich while living in the middle of a ruined country. Is it what would make you satisfied?"
Conservatism is not about dire pessimists moaning and weeping about some presumed "ruined country". Whats next ? "worse economy since Hoover"?
Now, despite your protestations to the contrary, you have clearly implied a simple class differentiation that really does not exist in our economy. No employer that I know of (including me) thinks of employees as a "necessary evil". No one. I could dismiss that thought as simply silly, but the fact is, it is just wrong. I could not run my office without employees - and I value them greatly. But their level of knowledge and experience is not up to my own - otherwise they would employee me. I need my people to be productive, so I must take into account their personal needs - up to a point. We none of us work in a vacuum - we are all human beings and we all have a life outside work (I won't hire anyone who doesn't - they frankly scare me). This means that business success (in part) depends on balancing the personal needs of workers with the need to be profitable. But my needs have to take precedence, as I am the job provider. That's reality.
You agree that we are not a feudal society, and it's true: we are not. But you continue to argue as though we were. Cost control is not some kind of bizarre market fetish - it is an imperative without which no business could suceed. Wages are a product of both market forces and government mandates. If you artificially force them up (minimum wage laws) - jobs disappear. If you artifically decrease wages (by allowing illegal aliens to take jobs Americans might otherwise do) - you create more jobs - but also a slew of social pathologies. We've done both, and suffered for it. In addition, and perhaps, most tellingly, almost one-third of the cost of hiring each new employee is due not to simple wage and benefit competition, or training expenses, but to Government mandates (SS/Medicare). Ours is a "mixed" economy- half capitalist, half socialist - and we still have a more productive workforce with lower unemployment than virtually the rest of the world.
That said, (and here's where you might be more tempted to agree with me) if it were up to me I'd build a huge fence around our borders to protect what we have and give a good slap upside the head of multinational corporate boards of directors for their idiotic short-sightedness and ridiculous compensation packages at the expense of their shareholders. It's an imperfect system. Humans are imperfect and are not perfectable - that's the fantasy of collectivists. Imperfection is not failure. Socialism on the other hand, is. The only way we advance is through knowledge and the free exercise of human rights. I wish more people would pay attention to and act to participate in the governance of their private institutions rather than demanding unearned benefits from the government. It may be my fantasy, but I think that's what our Founders had in mind. (Sorry for being so darned long-winded, but I love the freedom this country affords us and I'm passionate about it).
Pat is "right", if you are a member of Hammas, the Taliban, are part of the power structure in Iran, belong to a neo-Nazi/skinhead group, and dream of a time when the KNOW NOTHINGS were running around America screaming about those damned immigrants; who were IRISH and/or Roman Catholic.
Close. How's this: "Having plunged us into an unnecessary war, Bush now confronts the real possibility of strategic defeat and a failed presidency. His victory in Iraq, like the wars of Wilson and FDR, has turned to ashes in our mouths. And like Truman's war in Korea and Kennedy's war in Vietnam, Bush's war has left America divided and her people regretting he ever led us in. But unlike the world wars, Korea and Vietnam, Bush cannot claim the enemy attacked us and we had no choice. Iraq is Bush's war."
Probably...LOL
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