Posted on 02/23/2004 12:11:31 AM PST by ETERNAL WARMING
An index of American decline
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: February 23, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Sen. John Edwards did not win Wisconsin, but he closed a huge gap with John Kerry with astonishing speed in the final week.
The issue propelling Edwards was jobs, the lost jobs under George Bush, and Edwards' attribution of blame for the losses on NAFTA and the trade deals for which John Kerry voted in Congress.
Edwards has plugged into an issue that could cost Bush his presidency. Indeed, Kerry's sudden conversion into fiery critic of trade deals for which he himself voted suggests that he senses not only his vulnerability on Super Tuesday, but his opportunity in the fall.
For a precise measure of what this issue is about, one can do no better than to consult Charles McMillion of MGB Services here. Each February, McMillion methodically pulls together from the Bureau of Labor Statistics his grim annual index of the decline and fall of the greatest industrial republic the world had ever seen.
Since Bush's inauguration, 2.8 million U.S. manufacturing jobs have simply vanished. By industry, the job losses are heaviest in computers, where 28 percent of all the manufacturing jobs that existed when Bush took office are gone, semiconductors where we have lost 37 percent, and communications equipment, where jobs losses have reached 39 percent in just three years.
One in three textile and apparel jobs has disappeared, and the losses continue to run at the rate of 100,000 jobs a year. This helps to explain Edwards' rout of Kerry in South Carolina.
With the markets soaring, the Bush recovery is being called a jobless recovery. Not so. We are creating millions of jobs overseas – even as we are destroying manufacturing jobs at a rate of 77,000 per month in the United States.
Consider. Last year, we bought $958 billion worth of foreign manufactures and our trade deficit in manufactures alone was over $400 billion, more than $1 billion a day. Millions of foreign workers now labor in plants that manufacture for America, doing jobs that used to be done by American workers.
Not so long ago, Detroit was the auto capital of the world and the United States was the first nation in the production of televisions.
Now we don't make televisions any more. And our trade deficits in cars, trucks, televisions, video cassette recorders, automatic data-processing equipment and office machines added up last year to $218 billion. We retain a trade surplus in airplanes and airplane parts, but, because of the competition from Airbus, that is shrinking.
After airplanes, our No. 1 export in terms of a trade surplus is ... soybeans. Corn is next, followed by wheat, animal feeds, cotton, meat, metal ore, scrap, gold, hides and skins, pulp and waste paper, cigarettes, mineral fuels, rice, printed materials, coal, tobacco, crude fertilizer and glass. Airplanes aside, the United States has the export profile of an agricultural colony.
Our largest trade deficit with any country is with China. It has rocketed from $22 billion in Clinton's first year to $124 billion last year. "The World's Most Unequal Trade Relationship" is how McMillion describes it.
What were our best-selling items to China, where we ran a $2.8 billion surplus? Oil seeds and soybeans. What was China's biggest selling items to us? Computers and electrical machinery and equipment, where Beijing ran surpluses at our expense of $50 billion.
There are bright spots, however, in the bleak jobs picture painted by McMillion. State and local governments added 600,000 workers in three years. Some 21.5 million of us now work for state, local and federal governments – one in six Americans, 7 million more workers than we have employed in all of manufacturing.
Perhaps this is what the Weekly Standard is bragging about when it celebrates Bush's "Big Government Conservatism."
To read these numbers is to understand the breach that has opened up in a conservative movement last united when Ronald Reagan went home to California.
To neoconservatives of the Wall Street Journal school, these trade numbers are yardsticks of their success at creating a Global Economy and measures of their triumph in championing NAFTA, the WTO and MFN for Beijing. To the Old Right, however, manufacturing was a critical component of American power, indispensable to our sovereignty and independence, and the access road for working Americans into the middle class.
Seeing the devastation of NAFTA and its progeny, sensing rising opportunity in the industrial Midwest, Democrats are jumping ship on free trade. Bush, if he does not temper his enthusiasm for these one-sided trade deals, may just go down with it. If he does, one prays he will at least ensure the neoconservatives have first been locked securely in the cargo hold.
No, actually, you want to engage in another world war that wrecks most of the manufacturing infrastructure outside the United States.
The prosperity enjoyed by American manufacturing from 1945-1975 was an anomaly brought about by the loss of plant capacity in Europe and the Far East during World War II.
I'd say this is true in any country around the world, probably less of a problem in the US. It is an interesting question. What is the solution? More savings plans, more small business opportunities? I'm not sure.
Why should an unidentified group of "workers" be the prime beneficiaries of investments that they presumably didn't make?
Please remove me from your ping list.
Democrats have to shave both their faces in the morning [Kerry is the exception with three long faces] but Pat doesn't have any such problem because it's impossible for him to shave with his own head stuck up his...
I've got to have respect for those who see that the kitchen is too hot and therefore decide, on their own, to leave it.
The free traders will give the spurious argument that the cheap DVD players raise our standard of living. They may do that, but it is temporary. It would be better for everyone including that consumer to buy one long lasting American product (e.g. shoes) than a cheap DVD player and a pair of cheap Chinese shoes, both of which will be worn out in a year.
Laugh all you want at my examples, but we are trading the family jewels for knock-off plastic trinkets.
Ah, yes. You want to control how the "sheeple" will spend their money--for their own good, of course.
How do you propose to get them to be more responisble?
Part of the issue is our productivity - quite simply, America has the most productive work force in the world. Per capita, we work harder, longer and more productively than any other population on the globe.
Our efficiency costs us jobs.
The downside is, we're also the most expensive, we have the highest wages and we have very nearly the highest cost of benefits, especially for retirement and health care.
To compete in a global market, our industries have to hold the line for the cost of goods sold as tightly as they can.
Meanwhile, our Congress keeps increasing the regulatory burdens on small and large businesses across the spectrum.
It is costly to do business in America because of OSHA, EPA and other extraordinary requirements. Mexico doesn't require an employer to report compliance with equal opportunity mandates.
Stanley Tool, like many other large American Corporations was ready to move offshore because of the high cost of taxes and IRS compliance rules for accounting.
We are a capitalist economy built on a free enterprise system. The job of a business is to be profitable at the bottom line and return earnings to its investors.
They do that by holding the line on costs and by playing effectively in a competitive market environment.
The primary purpose of a business is not to provide jobs. Like buying raw material, a company hires the people it needs to get the job done and the lowest possible price.
Yes, it is to their benefit to use all the Organizational Behavior techniques they can to enhance the efficiency of their workforce.
If we want to keep jobs in America, the labor force has to be competitive - we've got to make it more attractive for businesses to operate in America and hire Americans than it is to go overseas.
The government needs to quit tyeing the hands of businesses behind their backs.
It is not the government's duty to provide jobs - it is the government's duty to get out of the way of those who do.
When the Big Kahuna Buchananite Himself can't be bothered to drive an American car, this is a loser of an idea.
Bottom line: sell me crap once, I will *NOT* say "Thank you sir, may I have another" and buy a second time.
After airplanes, our No. 1 export in terms of a trade surplus is ... soybeans. Corn is next, followed by wheat, animal feeds, cotton, meat, metal ore, scrap, gold, hides and skins, pulp and waste paper, cigarettes, mineral fuels, rice, printed materials, coal, tobacco, crude fertilizer and glass. Airplanes aside, the United States has the export profile of an agricultural colony.Clearly, the "export profile" of the U.S. does not bother Pat a whit, as by his standard, we should export more corn and soybeans and concentrate on that increasing that share of agricultural goods exports from 8%. In other words, Pat (the economist) correctly identifies some of the comparative advantages, but Pat (the Luddite) looks at the largest exporting country on the globe and sees an "agricultural colony." His supporters, meanwhile, skip right-over the passage I emphasized. Nothing is more important than their faith in the idea that our economy sucks and that no one but Pat can save them.
But he lacked the conviction to own a Caddie in the first place.
It's a vicious circle being created. Due to destruction of well paying jobs, vast swaths of our population can no longer afford American made even if they want to. The have to shop in Wal-Mart and buy crap from China and other foreign goods
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