Posted on 08/17/2016 7:09:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
International trade figures heavily in the presidential race. Presidential candidate Donald Trump said, "Hillary Clinton unleashed a trade war against the American worker when she supported one terrible trade deal after another - from NAFTA to China to South Korea." And adding, "A Trump Administration will end that war by getting a fair deal for the American people. The era of economic surrender will finally be over." He lamented, "Skilled craftsmen and tradespeople and factory workers have seen the jobs they love shipped thousands and thousands of miles away."
Hillary Clinton has offered her own condemnations of trade and globalization. Some see her stance on trade as little more than typical campaign rhetoric. Bill Watson's Reason magazine article "Hillary Clinton's Protectionist Promises Would Do Serious Economic Damage," looked at Clinton's trade agenda. Watson concluded that for "fans of free trade and globalization, Clinton is a much more appealing candidate simply by not being horrible."
It is true that the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has been in steep decline for almost a half-century, but manufacturing employment disguises the true story of American manufacturing. U.S. manufacturing output has increased by almost 40 percent. Annual value added by U.S. factories has reached a record $2.4 trillion. To put that in perspective, if our manufacturing sector were a separate nation, it would be the seventh richest nation on the globe.
Daniel Griswold's Los Angeles Times article tells the story: "Globalization isn't killing factory jobs. Trade is actually why manufacturing is up 40 percent." Griswold is senior research fellow and co-director of the Program on the American Economy and Globalization at George Mason University-based Mercatus Center. He says what has changed in recent decades is that our factories produce fewer shirts, shoes, toys and tables. Instead, America's 21st-century manufacturing sector is dominated by petroleum refining, pharmaceuticals, plastics, fabricated metals, machinery, computers and other electronics, motor vehicles and other transportation equipment, and aircraft and aerospace equipment.
Griswold suggests that political anger about lost manufacturing jobs should be aimed at technology, not trade. According to a recent study by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, productivity growth caused 85 percent of the job losses in manufacturing from 2000 to 2010, a period that saw 5.6 million factory jobs disappear. In that same period, international trade accounted for a mere 13 percent of job losses.
Manufacturing job loss is a worldwide phenomenon. Charles Kenny, writing in Bloomberg, "Why Factory Jobs Are Shrinking Everywhere," points out manufacturing employment has fallen in Europe and Korea and "one of the largest losers of manufacturing jobs has been China."
While job loss can be traumatic for the individual who loses his job, for the nation job loss often indicates economic progress. In 1790, farmers were 90 percent of the U.S. labor force. By 1900, about 41 percent of our labor force was employed in agriculture. Today, less than 3 percent of Americans are employed in agriculture. What would Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton have done in the face of this precipitous loss of agricultural jobs? They might have outlawed all of the technological advances in science and machinery that have made our farmers the world's most productive and capable of producing the world's cheapest food.
There's one thing to keep in mind. Losing a job due to outsourcing or losing it to technological innovation produces the same result for an individual: He's out of a job. The best thing that we can do is to have a robust economy such that he can find another job.
History suggests another alternative to those concerned about manufacturing job loss. The Luddites were 19th-century English textile workers who protested against newly developed labor-saving technologies. They went about destroying machinery that threatened to replace them with less-skilled, low-wage laborers.
And Ford/Chevy/Mopar raise their prices $1,999.99.
Net quality improvement - zero.
Net job gain in the auto industry - zero.
Net job loss in all the businesses which will earn less because people have to spend more on cars - huge.
>>Agreed. But the next war isn’t going to be anything like WWII. Also, as a teacher, I have a hard time seeing auto workers making $52/hr with benefits while I worked for half that. If they want to keep their jobs and not find themselves displaced by machines or their jobs exported, perhaps they need to temper their wage demands. My last 5 years teaching I never did get a raise. Sorry, but that WWII protectionism just doesn’t play in today’s world.
The UAW contracts with Big Auto are a special case and we shouldn’t look at them as the standard. In the 1950s, when prosperity was an assumption in all business plans, the auto companies and unions didn’t care how much the workers made. So, the unions asked for the sky and the companies gladly gave it because the profit margins on cars were just that high. They knew that the wages of Americans were climbing steadily and people would pay whatever it cost to get a car, so you had this incestuous relationship between the company and the union.
So, I agree. The UAW needs to accept less, but not less than a non-union worker at Toyota or Nissan makes and they make over $30/hr with magnificent benefits.
As for teachers, I’m sorry that you chose your profession. Didn’t your teachers in high school warn you that you would not make a six figure salary? When I was a kid, the teachers complained constantly about their low pay, so teaching was not something I was interested in doing. I live in Florida, which has pretty bad schools, but an entry level teacher starts at $52k/yr, with good benefits and two months off in the summer, 2 weeks off for “winter”, a week for thanksgiving, a week for “spring”, and a teacher “work day” about every 3 weeks where their “customers” (the kids”) stay home. By comparison, a union electrician at our best industrial employer in town makes about $52k/yr with 2 weeks off a year—period.
On a supply vs demand scale, universities churn out thousands of teachers every year, but an industrial electrician is very hard to find and retain.
As for the charge of “protectionism”, why does it always have to be all or nothing? You either have to be in favor of unfettered borderless globalism or you are a “protectionist”. What if a person is in favor of globalism, but with restraints—like the circuit breakers they use on stock trading? Have you considered that as an alternative to the “all or nothing” perspective?
It used to be that teachers were primarily married women with husbands who made more than enough to support them. So pay wasn’t an issue, they did it simply because they enjoyed teaching.
>>But the next war isn’t going to be anything like WWII.
Everyone wants to assume that the “next” war will be another low-intensity, Special Ops and smart bombs war like the current ones. It is suicide to make that assumption. A nation needs to prepare for a war where our planes get shot down, our tanks destroyed, and our ships sunk. If it doesn’t happen, great. But if it does and we cannot replace losses and our enemy can....well, see what happened to the CSA in the Civil War or Germany in WW2. We won because of the Arsenal of Democracy—which is the manufacturing base. Go look at the production numbers and you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s mind-boggling and we already had most of the factories and shipyards built and operating!
I waiting for Ford to announce sticker price reductions on the Mexican made vehicles. I guess they will when Carrier and Nabisco announce their price reductions. LOL!
PS only an idiot thinks the consumer benefits from off shoring.
>>It used to be that teachers were primarily married women with husbands who made more than enough to support them. So pay wasn’t an issue, they did it simply because they enjoyed teaching.
Yep. The sad thing is that I know many married couples where the female teacher is the primary breadwinner because she has great benefits and a steady paycheck, while the husband is forced to find work on the outsourced economy competing with import labor. The bottom line is that a teacher is still just a government employee and they make darn good money for this particular time and, like all government workers, enjoy job stability that most Americans can only dream of.
The buggy whip analogy is stupid, like free Traders. Buggy whips are useless items the last time I checked ford Focus and other cars are still viable products.
If it’s technology, we should still be making the shirts so check the origin tag on the shirts and you have proof that technology did not make them.
The Free Traders forgot to build the extermination camps when they when down this road.
Williams is full of it. We have lost 55,000 and 12,000,000 manufacturing jobs since 2002.
Williams is a globalist Free Trade propagandist.
That is like saying losing your wallet is the same as having it stolen at gunpoint.
If we had an H-1B visa program for senile old economists that program would be dead in 2 days.
Price reductions is one one way of looking at it. The other way is that it keeps the prices from rising a $1000 per car.
The buggy whip analogy is to elucidate for the Luddite a product that is useless but is kept the production to keep them workers employed. What we are talking about on this thread is who and where VIABLE and VALUABLE products are made. But you knew that I think but then again you may stupid because I’ve told yo this at least a dozen times.
You’re entitled to your opinion which you’ve now repeated. So what. The Germans are uninterested.
Big cap manufactures love regulations. It keeps the upstart riff raff out of the market. You don’t see K Street lobbying for lower regulations. They just want to keep the tariffs at 0%. That is ALL they care about.
We have 4 times the pollution of Germany.
So we take away their factory jobs and then blame the victims. Why not just exterminate them? IS this what is mans to be a conservative?
Share holders are foreign nationals making money off of Americas demise.
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