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're rooting for the dismantling of America, so you can start from scratch. Just wanted everyone to be clear where you stand.
Meanwhile, what do you suggest we do with the half of mankind having IQ's of less than 100 . . . put them on the dole until we can print them new brains?
No I want to dismantle the Unionista/Big Gub'ment system that you and your ilk keeping making bigger and start from scratch.
First step eliminate the Gub'ment meddling in the markets This includes Obamacare, mandatory Minimum wages, over regulation by the EPA OSHA and all the other usesless government make-work agencies. Remove payroll deductions and make it mandatory everyone write a check for their taxes and that check must be postmarked/ internet time stamped between October 1st and Oct. 30th. Also Tax brackets and deductions. Every one pays the same rate (and that means everyone) and No deductions for anything period. Churches, Charities, Mega Corps and even businesses who operate off shore will pay the same rate.
Step Two is every state is a right to work state.
Step Three: Close the damn borders all of them and not with a fence but a freaking 20 foot high wall that is deep enough to drive two cars side by side on top. then bring most of the troops home and have them man the walls. Have the Navy help with guarding the coast.
Step Four stand back and watch and when the dust clears the economy will soar and Unions and Big Gub'ment types will forever be crushed!
You’re wasting your time having an economic debate with unionists.
Their Communist/Socialist leaders ate their brains.
Well, in the first place we have to stop importing them.
And then there is the secondary markets; building trades, repairmen, delivery drivers, store clerks, etc that are just as important as any other type of work.
Again, the wage differentials dwarf the cost of compliance.
Even if you could accomplish all of that, we’d still be off-shoring faster than we can create new jobs. Not saying that your reforms wouldn’t help some, but not enough.
Plus, I don’t think removing payroll deductions is politically feasible. And I don’t think a flat tax is fair or a good idea. The rest might be feasible, but it’s insufficient to stop the off-shoring.
Again, the wage differentials dwarf the cost of compliance.
Even if you could accomplish all of that, we’d still be off-shoring faster than we can create new jobs. Not saying that your reforms wouldn’t help some, but not enough.
Plus, I don’t think removing payroll deductions is politically feasible. And I don’t think a flat tax is fair or a good idea. The rest might be feasible, but it’s insufficient to stop the off-shoring.
Well I've been in business for over 35 years and I can safely say you have not a freaking clue about what you claim.
The cost of compliance dwarfs the cost of labor because the cost of compliance multiplies labor costs.
Starting with mandatory minimum wages and matching funds required by the Gub'ment and then adding in all the other Compliance costs that have to do with the Gub'ment "make-work" agencies.
And don't forget the FED devaluing the dollar faster than you can saw Unionista.
Total Labor Union membership in private sector runs about 12%, so my guess is that manufacturing is way way low, perhaps around the 3%-5% — in specific hands on product manufacturing.
No need to guess though, the definitive is:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
If the point you’re trying to make is it’s too little to be concerned about then you’re not understanding the numbers here. 10% of a ginormous number is still a huge number. Project that back to the 70’s when it was more like 20%, then take into account parasitic and cannibalistic nature of funding, deficit spending, inflation , huge yearly trade deficits and taxation on interest and dividends and finally the burgeoning bureaucracy and the ever increasing tooth to tail ratio.
So that's the $0.09 subsidy you expect me to pay (to save jobs, dontcha know) by buying a domestic screwdriver. Well, multiply that 10% across the whole economy. Who is worried about my job because I have less money? Not you.
Its about the NEXT factory, tariffs would influence manufacturers considering moving offshore. In this case it is a good influence.
So I lost my job (and possibly went on food stamps) so the next screwdriver factory can be built here. Who says government can’t work?
Well maybe free traders are right, those people, our fellow Americans, that used to work in manufacturing that couldn’t cut it becoming brain surgeons should just commit suicide.
Further the main reason the FED inflates the money supply is to pay the Debt of the Government. It is not at the behest of Corporate America.
Devaluing the dollar doesn't make them richer it just devalues their dollar the same as mine and your dollars.
Real wages have diminished because buying power of the dollar has diminished and this is due to the FED and no one else.
Absolutely.
Reagan was right. The size, scope, and cost of government must be reduced, not increased.
When all else fails, change the subject (again).
Yeah.
In a related story.
If you like your insurance you can keep your insurance...
“If you don’t like your tariff, you don’t have to pay your tariff. Period.”
This gets so confusing the protectionist are called communists by the free traders who in turn get in bed with Communist China to produce our consumer goods using slave labor? Wait, What?
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