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.
So you think, while paying no attention to industries that rely (in part or in whole), upon imported inputs.
To the contrary union shops are a little harder to offshore because they have political connections. Non unions factories has no one looking out for them or America.
fixed.
Again, explaining why union "shops" have nearly ceased to exist in the U.S., except in the government.
Oh I can guarantee it. Once the congress critters get THAT particular bit between their teeth it will be Katie-bar-the door.
And of course none if your pie-in-the-sky tariff schemes deal with all the compliance costs of locating a manufacturing business here in the USA. Its why your $1.00 to $1.10 increases is so laughable.
You are all pretending that Obamcare and the EPA and OSHA and the Greenie movement and the Tort Lawyers won't have a huge impact on the issue.
You also pretend that the lobbyists won't riddle your tariff to the point it will be so complex all that will get done is it will make more lawyers rich as they constantly go to court over exemptions and rulings etc.
Now my question is are you really that naive or is it part of the unionista movement to point over there while ignoring whats over here?
They are either in the GNP number or they are in the Import number. They are in the equation.
They are either in the GNP number or they are in the Import number. They are in the equation.
"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. "
How much money to you feel like taking out of my pocket? C’mon, just give me a ballpark number.
YES EGGSACTLY! And your tariff does nothing to reduce the compliance costs of the EPA, OSHA, OBAMCARE, TORT LAYWERS, NIMBYS, TAXES and so on and so forth.
Its like you want to pretend those costs have no bearing whatsoever on the cost of goods produced in the USA.
Congress was the one that lowered the tariffs in the first place. I don't buy the argument that we can't fix anything because Congress will only increase and not decrease taxes.
And of course none if your pie-in-the-sky tariff schemes deal with all the compliance costs of locating a manufacturing business here in the USA. Its why your $1.00 to $1.10 increases is so laughable.
Only businesses that are competitive against the tariffed product will locate here. So it's not like we are going to raise the price of a product from $1.00 to $1.10 and then someone will relocate to the U.S. and charge $5.00. They are only going to relocate here if they can produce it <=$1.10.
You are all pretending that Obamcare and the EPA and OSHA and the Greenie movement and the Tort Lawyers won't have a huge impact on the issue.
Again, they will relocate here if they can produce competitively against the tariffed product.
You also pretend that the lobbyists won't riddle your tariff to the point it will be so complex all that will get done is it will make more lawyers rich as they constantly go to court over exemptions and rulings etc.
Again with the fatalistic, "we can't try to fix anything because you don't trust congress".
Now my question is are you really that naive or is it part of the unionista movement to point over there while ignoring whats over here?
Are you that much of a wuss, that you give up before you've even started to fight?
So you put a ten percent tariff on and then do nothing about the majority of compliance costs and then admit they will only locate here if they can make it cheaper but only considering the increased tariff costs NOT the fact that they now have waaaaay more compliance costs with things like Obamacare and such.
You do understand those costs won't magically disappear right?
So explain again what does the tariff do besides putting more money at the disposal of congress to buy more votes with?
Keep giving you increases until your job is exported or done by an H1B. I hope you are getting close. We could use you on our side.
The wood was in the import number and the screwdriver was in the GNP number.
Lets say wood is 16% of the cost of the screw driver. (Coincidently the same porportion as tariffs to GNP). And let’s say the screw driver costs $1.00 to produce pre-tariff and the wood costs $0.16 to import. We increase the cost of the wood by 10% so it now costs $0.176. Nothing else changes, so the cost to produce the screwdriver is $1.016, a 1.6% increase.
Excellent non answer answer.
Bottom line does your tariff eliminate the compliance costs of Obamacare, OSHA, EPA, TORT Lawyers, NIMBYs, Taxes and so on and so forth?
yes or no?
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”
― Friedrich von Hayek
But I’m reducing your taxes because the government is not supporting the unemployed. Maybe you’re a big taxpayer and you’ll save more. As for the number, ask your boss what he has in mind to export your job or hire a H1B. He knows better than me.
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