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.
Finally, businesses should serve the people rather than pursuing profit. They are not one and the same. The profit motive is a globalist conspiracy to reward savers, investors and risk takers. It should be eliminated in favor of something more fair.
And you haven’t shown that that figure is remotely connected to the massive outsourcing that has eliminated American manufacturing jobs in the last two decades. Let’s see you bring up the study so we can see how they arrive at that figure instead of having you parrot it like it’s Gospel.
And if you intend to come across as less of a dunce you could at least copy the figure correctly from the article, it’s 85%.
According to the American Prospect, since 2000, the U.S. has lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs, with 2.1 million jobs lost in the past two years.
The American Prospect also estimates that, since 2001, 42,400 American factories have closed their doors, and roughly three-fourths of those employed over 500 people while they were in operation.
According to Moodys, one million of those jobs will never come back. And the National Association of Manufacturers says that the best-case scenario is 540,000 of those jobs returning or being replaced in the manufacturing sector in the next five years.
Read the article that I linked to on 163, you’ll find it interesting.
The government's job is to protect Americans from predatory and monopolistic business practices. It is OK for American to compete against American. It is not ok to pit American against third world coolie.
Smoot Hawley did not cause the Great Depression. That meme/myth is a hilarious lie.
I’ve read it.
And I grew around his articles. He is wrong about tariffs causing the Great Depression. He is a bought off hack. The US built historic growth around tariffs. That is undeniable history.
Walter Williams needs to crack open an American History book.
Trade is about price AND quality. Slaves make poor quality such as the Antebellum blacksmith, because slaves cannot personally grow and advance. The foreign garbage products of poor quality has gotten tiresome. Call it foreign trade, but trash is trash.
Economics says that the obvious is not. You must look elsewhere for truth.
Your neighbor is a slave chained to his lemonade stand. The price is right. Will you drink the lemonade??
The lemonade is likely to be poor quality urine. Drink up. Slaves do not personally grow, so they make bad products, such as U.S. pets dying or poor health eating Chinese pet food.
For free trade to succeed requires all parties subject to a free Constitution, such as, the USA.
up
Profits are great. Profits at the expense of the USA and hastening socialism and then communism not so much.
Name ONE company that had to offshore or it was lights out.
Free Traders don't read or know history. To them the world started when NAFTA was signed.
If we go to war with China, we'll have to fight it without Daisy BB guns.
You made the statement:"if you intend to come across as less of a dunce you could at least copy the figure correctly from the article, its 85%".
Here's the direct quote from Williams article: "In that same period, international trade accounted for a mere 13 percent of job losses."
Unless 100-13 = 85, you've just proven who the dunce is.
If you start running your mouth about free trade during a hot war with China you’d better be ready to run for your life from the pitchfork and torch crowd.
“Smoot Hawley did not cause the Great Depression. That meme/myth is a hilarious lie. “
At eh.net you can find write-ups on the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922, the rates of which were very close to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.
The F-M Tariff was followed by the Roaring 20s, something that the S-H Tariff boogieman crowd can’t explain. Maybe the words “Smoot-Hawley” contain some magic that “Fordney-McCumber” lacks because otherwise the two tariffs weren’t much different.
Anyway economic data shows that the Great Depression began around August of 1929 and Smoot-Hawley wasn’t signed into law until nearly a full year later. The tariff didn’t help things but it wasn’t the cause of the Depression, the cause generally believed to be the massive cascading failure in the American banking system. Friedman and Schwartz devote a long chapter to this in their A Monetary History of the United States, and Schumpeter wrote about the role of American bank failures and the Depression as well.
What a surprise; another site nag desperate for attention w/the usual game plan:
* utter something confrontational, inflammatory or stupid.
* wait for contrary retorts.
* repeat, while changing the subject.
And all for 15 minutes of attention. Wow.
Try haunting a house!
I think yo is the one who needs help. Williams quote from THIS article (that's today) is "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."
No one is disputing that jobs have been lost. The whole point of this article is that the primary cause is productivity improvements, not foreign trade.
Let’s see you produce the study. All you have done is parrot.
Actually, their backs only get wet when swimming the Rio Grande to get here.
Why would that make idiots mad at me?
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