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.
If the issue was productivity improvements it it would be done as easily in American plants, which then wouldn’t be empty shells. But that isn’t the case. Entire industries are relocating outside the country leaving nothing behind. The issue, as Paul Craig Roberts has been saying, is global labor arbitrage.
Dont bother arguing with them either.
They are immune to facts like Williams’s.
>>Every time I see people waving these signs, I ask myself: Do I want to subsidize these people?
Manufacturing jobs are about more than trade and the bottom line. Manufacturing is a nation’s lifeblood in a war. It is a way to keep people working and off welfare.
Remember how our massive auto industry stepped up in WW2 to make everything from tanks to bombers. Our typewriter and sewing machine manufacturers made guns and bombsights. But a nation that can’t even build an airplane without outsourcing has no way to build a war machine...especially if the other side in the war consists of China and its satellites.
You are subsidizing “those people” already and they don’t contribute a thing. Subsidize them at work and at least they contribute something.
In any case what we DON’T enjoy now is equivalent numbers of Americans employed at “better”, more efficient, higher skilled jobs producing higher technology goods that the world would demand. My guess is that we probably would have if not for the interference of our own gummint in the markets.
I wish my daughter had a job in a factory making plastic scrub brushes. These used to be Merican jobs!
And he also included oil as a manufactured product. This alone terribly skews his numbers. Yes, fracking has massively increased productivity.
No, it did not cause our factories to close, but there it is in the equation.
The article is misleading.
Honest to God, I used to shoot with a guy that had an M-1 that was made by Rockola. He had another made by International Harvester. He said he couldn’t shoot that one because all it wanted to do was “raise crops.”
When I visit Germany, I notice factories almost everywhere I go. They are making the things we used to. The theorists here are killing our middle class. They look at a chart showing productivity and look at stack prices and conclude the economy is awesome.
The middle class never crosses their mind. It doesn’t exist, or need to.
Any statistician can cut the numbers any which way and all of us know about the technical changes etc, etc.
Trump isn't against trade and he isn't xenophobic but there are genuine questions concerning how beneficial the current deals are for the middle class (we know the corps love the status quo).
I wish my daughter had a job in a factory making plastic scrub brushes. These used to be Merican jobs!
If your daughter’s alternative was chronic unemployment she might not be too proud to take assembly line work. Usually those who disparage such work can’t imagine doing a job that they feel is beneath them.
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.
As long as the job that replaced the old job is in the USA, there is no problem, but when the new job is in Communist China.....thats a problem for U.S.
We already subsidize various areas in income more so than china as well. China doesn't try to stabilize the ME, China doesn't patrol the international water ways safe with a Navy like US.
I'd like to see the number when it comes to having a jobs here as opposed to outsourcing and paying other forms of welfare.
Finally, some of the largest proponents of 'free trade' are the ones usually immune to it in the form of academic tenure.
Joke about scrub brushes. But someone used to build and maintain the machinery. Someone used to mine coal. Someone used to make levis. Someone used to make Carrier air conditioners. Someone used to make Ford pickups. Someone used to process lumber, fish, raise crops in the San Joaquin valley. (the water was cut off, farming was killed, and Mexican farmers got the windfall)
These people who you laugh at bought houses, raised kids, and provided for a family with these jobs.
RAISE a tariff of 2000 dollars on cars imported. Keep the jobs and make 5 billion, and foreign countries pay for it.
instead of killing off 25 thousand American jobs.
Raise a tariff? What wrong with you? We are the party of Reagan!!
Wait....What? Reagan did what with motorcycles? Because it was important to him to save the jobs at Harley Davidson? And he put 100% tariff on some Japanese electronics in 1987?
Hmmmmmmmmm /s
Comparative advantage was David Ricardo's rationale for the standard free trade model. It assumed the immobility of many factors of production because in the early 1800s that was the background reality. But today we are confronted with absolute advantage in the form of a huge Asian labor surplus and not the comparative advantage of Ricardo's model.
Talk about projection.
The only results of free trade agreements is a sharp drop in quality of products, along with a static or increase in the price. Also add in the rampant inflation of domestic goods due to a weakened dollar, all with the cost of welfare on the remaining taxpayers due to the lost jobs, and the average person will not side with the free trade crowd.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.