Posted on 07/25/2013 3:24:46 AM PDT by IbJensen
When will Republicans wake up to the way U.S. jobs are betrayed by Barack Obama and the corporate interests that hide under the moniker "free trade"? It's an embarrassment that Republican powers-that-be have joined with the Obama Democrats to push the new Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.
We should have recognized free trade as bad news when Obama hammered on it in his State of the Union message. He probably looks upon it as another strategy to redistribute the wealth of our country, which is a major goal of his administration.
In 2012 when Congress was passing the Korea-U.S. Trade Agreement (KORUS), Obama predicted that it would create 70,000 U.S. jobs for Americans who would then pay taxes and not need food stamps. He even predicted, "soon, there will be new cars on the streets of Seoul imported from Detroit."
The bad effect was immediate. In the first year after KORUS took effect, the U.S. trade deficit with South Korea increased by $5.8 billion, costing 40,000 jobs, mostly in manufacturing, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
KORUS was really good in creating jobs in Korea but caused a big loss of American jobs. While the U.S. trade deficit with the world increased 21 percent, our trade deficit with Korea jumped 81 percent.
We're still waiting to see Detroit-made cars on the streets of Seoul. With that experience, it makes no sense for our trade negotiators to expand and imitate the KORUS model.
Remember NAFTA? The year before NAFTA, the U.S. ran a $1.6 billion trade surplus with Mexico. Last year, the U.S. ran a $64 billion deficit.
NAFTA was predicted to create 20,000 new U.S. jobs by increasing our exports to Mexico. That turned out to be another pipe dream; by 2010, NAFTA had eliminated 682,900 U.S. jobs, some in every state.
Business news sources have recently been predicting that U.S. manufacturing is on the verge of a large, permanent comeback because labor costs in China are rising and U.S. energy costs are dropping. Some writers became so excited that they dubbed the change "the insourcing boom."
Dream on. It isn't happening. Even after labor costs increase in China, there is no way they will rise enough to send U.S. plants back to the U.S. (Many will move to Vietnam.)
Trade agreements are supposed to be about increasing job-creating exports. They are not. They are about creating imports from low-wage countries that often cheat us coming and going.
Even our friend South Korea is into the cheating racket. In order to sell us some products even cheaper than those produced by their own low wages, South Korea arranged for some products to be manufactured over the border in North Korea, which means we are helping to finance North Korea to build its nuclear weapons to threaten us.
These trade agreements are supposed to be about promoting U.S. exports. Since we started going along with these free-trade agreements, imports have increased much faster than exports, creating jobs in other countries.
The U.S. has consistently run trade deficits with South Korea ($13 billion last year), according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The deficit soared after the agreement took effect. Since 2000, the United States has lost almost a third (5.5 million) of its manufacturing jobs, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The evidence is so overwhelming that one wonders about the honesty of those who advocate more such trade deals. Do they really want American workers to be in competition with low-wage countries that don't respect any of our hard-fought employment rights and benefits, and work in conditions where the building can collapse at any time (as happened a few months ago, killing more than a thousand employees)?
The trade agreements are a violation of U.S. sovereignty and our Constitution. The sponsors of these trade agreements realize they are unwelcome to the American people.
Since they are treaties with foreign governments, they should be handled only in a procedure that requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Instead, their handlers are putting them through both Houses of Congress by a simple majority vote.
Fifty-thousand Americans gave their lives in the 1950s to keep South Korea free, and we've maintained an expensive border patrol ever since to protect the South Koreans against Communist North Korea, so South Korea doesn't have to pay for its own defense. We shouldn't give South Korea American jobs, too.
So where did the 10 Million manufacturing jobs go after they left the USA?
So the slave wages paid by the Commie Chinese had nothing to do with the exodus of Crony Caps to China. Agree about the tax/reg burdens in US but whose GD fault is that? Those 10 million manufacturing jobs exported represent one of the few stepping stones to joining and strengthening the Middle Class, the only group of people capable of defeating the Commie takeover! Look what ‘free’ aka Global Regulated Trade (World Bank, BIS, WTO, G20, etc.) has done. Don’t be trapped in a bogus world view. These are the days of eat or be eaten!
Sorry IbJ, comment #21 & #22 were meant for Bert.
No jobs were exported.
Plants closed because American workers were not competitive on the world market. Had the manufacturing not been moved, the jobs would have been lost because the place went broke.
That happened in England when the textiles industry moved to New England. It happened again when New England was deserted and the textile industry moved to the Carolinas. It is gone from there now for the same reason. Americans just were not competitive.
You speak of jobs as an object. Jobs are labor. Labor is a commodity to be purchased at a competitive rate.
When you begin to think in terms of Chicaps, you will begin the process of enlightenment.
Dwelling in an anomalous past is to live in the dark
First you need to deal with the assumption that they actually left the country.
So if Manufacturing Output for the USA is increasing BUT Manufacturing Jobs are decreasing are these Jobs being sent elsewhere OR are they being eliminated with technology and robotics and increased efficiency?
that is NOT all there is to it,
We agree that we're talking about import taxes (even though it's not all there is to it) and we understand that I want lower taxes and I understand you disagree with me on something but you don't want to answer my question. So even though I'm still not following your thinking we have come quite a ways here.
Chicaps?
America has more jobs and industries since NAFTA began than before.
Yep you are right about the mfg output having risen, assuming that this compares apples to apples. Output could be final product value/price but the many parts of the final product are mfg’d in other countries, (aircraft, automobiles, etc). The manufacturing jobs/employees have been replaced w/ low paying service jobs or w/ welfare...the perfect storm for civil chaos.
Sometimes jobs vanish without moving overseas.
How many buggy-whip manufacturers went belly-up?
Since 1975, average inflation adjusted personal incomes have doubled even while the number of American manufacturing workers has fallen by a third:
Actually many of those jobs have been replaced by machines.
A couple of real life examples for you.
In a manufacturing plant located in Indiana they made parts for a FORD car AC unit one of the parts was a valve. Now when they started making this part the line had 12 people on it. After a few years the line was upgraded with a machine.
The machine replaced 10 of the people on the line. You literally could have one guy dump the raw material in one end, and at the other end a guy picked the parts up and put them in a box. Now I am told the guy at the end doing the boxing has been replaced as well. 11 jobs lost to automation on one line of one plant. There were multiple lines just like that one in the very same plant lost to the same automation.
BUT the unions will all cry about outsourcing because they can make Americans think someone else is getting the jobs when in truth they are being eliminated due to tech and efficiency. But its a hard argument to make that we need to toss our wooden sabots into the machines so Union Workers can have cushy jobs.
In a Kenworth plant a few miles northwest of where I live I was employed for a short time "grinding" the rough spots off of fiberglass truck tops. When this plant upgraded to newer process the need to grind these trucktops diminished to nearly zilch. Most of the section I was in was eliminated because they manufacturing process became more efficient.
This is the dirty little secret of US manufacturing. And many times unions will fight the implementation of these newer more efficient manufacturing techniques because their membership diminishes.
Yes there are factories that relocate. Locally there was a strike over a contract that finally sent about 400 jobs to Mexico. These jobs could've stayed here but the Union would not relent and the law in Ohio is that if a union gets its fingers into a company they can never get them out yet there were twice as many people for those 400 jobs that would have gladly worked the contract offered by the plant. So tell me, who sent those particular jobs to Old Mexico? Unions are stuck on stupid the reality of 21st Century America is that manufacturing jobs are shrinking and its easier for a company to either leave OR eliminate jobs by using newer tech.
This trend will continue until sanity is restored in the American Business landscape.
Chicaps are Chinese capitalsts. They are ascendnet and the face of change
Why is it, expat, that everything we buy comes from China or Korea?
Even many production line parts for the ‘Big Three’ come from Asia.
And another thing. Many products that are labeled ‘Mexico’ are shipped from China to Mexico then reshipped to the United States.
You’re not, by any chance, engaged in import are you?
As we say down on the friendly border with our neighbor to the south: no problemo.
Two things are going to have to be done. There are more, but that will have to come after the revolution.
1. Eliminate the corporate income tax.
2. Take a meat axe to all regulatory agencies of the central socialist government.
Free trade never creates an unlevel field, corporate taxes and excessive regulation do. We have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world, and that puts our businesses in a disadvantage from the get-go.
The whole discussion about "free trade" largely revolves around the competing underlying objectives of: (1) maximizing U.S. employment in certain industries, and (2) improving the overall standard of living in the U.S. Where you fall on the issue of "free trade" is really a function of which of these two objectives you're looking to meet.
There are additional issues that come into play, too. Here's a good case in point from the original article:
Remember NAFTA? The year before NAFTA, the U.S. ran a $1.6 billion trade surplus with Mexico. Last year, the U.S. ran a $64 billion deficit.
What the author doesn't point out is that these enormous "trade deficits" with Mexico involve imports that have tremendous value to the U.S. According to U.S. trade statistics, total imports from Mexico into the U.S. were about $278 billion in 2012. The single largest product or raw material in these trade statistics is crude oil ($37B). Since NAFTA was passed in the early 1990s, Mexico and Canada have surpassed Saudi Arabia as the largest foreign suppliers of oil to the U.S. Is Ms. Schlafly -- or anyone here on FreeRepublic -- going to suggest that this is somehow a BAD thing?
The second-largest import from Mexico into the U.S. for 2012 was auto parts and accessories ($32B), which was almost twice the value of new/used cars ($17B). Most of these parts and accessories support the production of automobiles right here in the U.S. How is this a problem, especially if the sourcing of these parts and components from Mexico enables auto plants here in the U.S. to compete effectively with foreign manufacturers?
“The single biggest factor in the loss of manufacturing and “middle class” jobs in the U.S. is not foreign trade — it’s automation. “
Textile, apparel, furniture making, and many consumer products assembly jobs did not disappear due to automation. Walk through any Walmart. Most of the consumer products sold in the store are not highly automated in production. If they were, the factories would be in the US and not China.
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