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.
oh I see, you are going to further dabble in the market by declaring what is and isn't a manufactured good.
Please list for us what is considered so. Also please tell us how you will stop the lobbyists from spending money on getting exemptions for their clients. Then explain how you guarantee all that tariff money will go to paying down the debt or will it just be an excuse to spend even more tax payer dollars on your Unionista/Big Gub'ment boondoggles?
Further, question is gasoline a manufactured good? How about lubricant oil? Will we need to import more of each being we can't get approval for more Oil distilleries due to EPA regs. ? Also consider that being our government is clamping down on carbon emissions how much will that impact on your screwdriver manufactured here in the united states? How do tariffs impact EPA regs., Obamacare costs, Tax compliance costs, OSHA Complaince costs. etc,
Remember all of those issues are still in effect.
You do but if you track the money you received it all traces back to the big three mining,agriculture and manufacturing. Well except for the fiat money the Fed creates I don't consider that wealth creation. It is BS..
So, I should go out and break some windows to create more wealth? Should we all?
Raw crude oil has never been consider a manufactured good it comes under mining - not manufacturing. Now imported gasoline is a manufactured good subject to tariffs.
The minimum wage has increased several hundred percent.
But the dollar has been gutted by printing more and more money.
Real wages are gutted by the FED.
Sounds Nazi like to me. Not sure I get your point.
I knew you wouldn’t.
Thank you for posting this.
And (you missed the rest of it) being that the EPA has pretty much closed down building any more oil distillieries in the USA will Gasoline be cheaper or more expensive with your proposed tariff?
Your thread not "You're thread" .
Obama is killing America’s Middle Class. The rise in business taxes and regulations. We are one of the higher taxed countries for business, and it makes people go where they can afford to do business, and Obama care will bankrupt many of the larger business conglomerates, who provide benefits. The atmosphere for business competition is driving us further out of the market prices with other nations.
America could compete if we did NOT have to add all those unnecessary charges to the cost of goods when pricing them, not to mention the Unions.
There is no such thing as “free trade” right now
You’re playing games with what you wrote the first time.
You claimed that 90% of all the Mfg jobs that were shipped overseas were nonunion, and that is false.
A big chunk of those jobs were union, that is why so few Mfg jobs are union today. Those that didn’t go overseas went to Mexico or RTW states down south.
Unions are/were a cancer on the US economy.
If the government is involved, of course not. However, if you pay someone $30 to plow your driveway, then yes.
Its already begun; database management, data mining, ecommerce matching buyers/sellers directly, world wide telecommunications, e publishing, etc. Hell, look at the internet. I, myself sell books all over the world from tiny little Taylorstown, PA.
3D printing could change great swathes of the market place.
How many people are employed in these industries today versus even 5 years ago? In another five years what will those numbers be
Look, I grew up in Pittsburgh in the bad old days when we were an industrial power house, and I have to tell you I don't miss that at all.
As w/ everything there's an up and a down, but really the new economy holds far greater potential for benefits than turning back the clock to assembly line/factory jobs.
The price of goods would increase but the price of government for the unemployed would do down. Pay me now or pay me later. No tariffs = lower product costs but labor costs are offloaded to the government which raises taxes. I go for tariffs.
I would come at Central_va's calculation of a few cents on the dollar a different way. If you raise tariffs by 10%, and you know imports are equivalent to 16% of our GNP, that's an average price increase of 1.6%. That puts an effective cap on the effect of the tariff.
Effectively the tariff will re-shore production of highly automated processes and products with lower labor components first. High labor products will continue to be off-shored.
And I'm not sure a 10% increase will be enough. A lot of damage has been done. I'd recommend raising the tariff 2.5% a quarter until full employment has been reached and using the proceeds to offset taxes on Americans.
Most effective argument for an increase in the minimum wage that I've seen, yet (on FR).
Reminds me of a song...
♪ Nothing from nothing leaves nothing ♫
yes EGGSACTLY Batman and waaaay more than your tariff. See you conveniently forgot all the compliance costs for a company to setup manufacturing in the USA.
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