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.
He's not dead?
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
Isn't there a rule somewhere that says anything from Pat has to have a BARF ALert?
If there's not, there sure should be.
More echoings from within Pat Buchanan's Hollow Head.
PCR is a leftwing moonbat. And if Pat thinks otherwise, he is one too.
Bump!
Keep in mind, that was the same raid that poop pat wrote about whining about how we had killed "innocent women and children"...and never once mentioned the bad guys who were the target.
Maybe so, but from the point of view of commerce there wouldn't be trade if there were no profits being made. There must be more to the story.
I used to like to watch Pat make fun of eleanor clift, but that was years ago. Now he's just a bitter, loser nut.
Pat Buchanan--the male Arianna Huffington.
Last year, the United States ran a $202 billion trade deficit with China, the largest ever between two nations.
They get the money, but we get all the stuff.
If we thought the paper drink umbrellas and the cheap rain coats and the plastic shoes weren't worth the couple bucks we paid for them, we wouldn't make the deal.
If we want crappy Chinese products, it's none of the Federal Government's (or Pat Buchanan's) business.
I think it's generally accepted that Pat Buchanan's name IS a BARF Alert.
Now there's an edifying comment on the deficit. Maybe you're not a US citizen?
Now that the U.S. trade deficit for 2005 has come in at $726 billion, the fourth straight all-time record, a question arises. Yeah, like, who cares?
Trade deficits do not measure the strength of the economy OTHER THAN indicating the demand for imported consummer goods are high and thus people have money to spend. Indeed, trade deficits are so high because many economies among our trading partners, though of course not China, are struggling and thus demand for US consumer goods are low in those countries, while America's economy continues to roar ahead. Buchanan using trade deficits to make negative judgments about the US economy shows his ignorance of economics.
Buchanan isn't an economist. Those who are INCLUDING the new Fed Chair, say the economy is humming right along. Patty Boy just hasn't gotten over the fact no one wants him to be president. And thank goodness for that. His trade protectionist policies would have tanked the US economy by slackening off demand for US products abroad even more and also by driving up inflation here at home.
I guess if Patty Boy wants to tell the American public to stop shopping at Wal Mart for inexpensive foreign goods and for foreign made electronics and appliances that are more affordable than if they were made here in the US, then I wish him good luck getting that message across. No one will be listening.
LOL. Very true.
From now on please use babelfish to convert Pat's writings from
'Stupid' to 'English'.
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