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.
How about Free Traders are globalist hacks and not patriots. Includes Williams.
Buggy whips are useless items because of technological changes and their impact on the labor market. It is those same technological changes -- as pointed out in the column -- that have driven most of the decline in manufacturing jobs, just like technology has driven the vast reduction in agricultural jobs. When technological advances in machinery allow one worker to produce what it took ten to produce a few years ago, that means that nine fewer workers are needed for that job.
The analogy is preposterous. We are talking about transferring the exact same job to the third world. Not automating jobs. Totally different situation. Factories are shutting down and the equipment shipped to the third world. US factories are not being automated. Williams is losing it.
So why are factories being SHUT down? The exact same products are made overseas by people doing the exact same thing Americans used to do. If you believe this globalist BS propaganda then you are really gullible.
That is like saying losing your wallet is the same as having it stolen at gunpoint.
Not at all. Demand for labor changes all the time. Some jobs are displaced by foreign competition, or outsourcing, and some are displaced by innovations that make the particular skillset less valuable, but either way if the job is displaced, then the worker is in the same condition of needing to find another job. That might mean the worker needs to develop another skillset in order to get a job for which there is demand.
I don’t talk to Free traders. The are anti-American globalist hacks and worse then Democrats.
The same reason they are being "shut down" everywhere. Other countries are also shedding manufacturing jobs as technology increases the productivity of each labor hour.
Your assumption is that Americans will consume the same amount on foreign made goods. They will spend the same amount but get less product. The average family only spends about 10% of their income on durable goods. The tariff will balance the budget, balance trade deficits, secure the dollar and increase buying power. The repatriation of industry will decrease unemployment. All good things.
Smoking pot? So if a factory in China automates what was the propose of offshoring? Wouldn't that same factory be just as profitable in the USA? With no labor costs( assuming 100% automation) then the offshoring meme gets a little stale. You are are what Marx called one of his useful idiots.
George Washingtonian was a protectionist. So was he misguided? The issues of trade are the same as they have always been.
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.So 5.6 million factory jobs disappeared from 2000 to 2010, of which 4.76 million were the result of productivity gains from technology and around 730,000 were lost due to international trade. This is the finding of a study by researchers based on market analysis by researchers driven by a study of market forces rather than by political activism. If you have studies to refute those findings, please share them. I tend to trust free-market economists more than I trust union trade studies or advocates of big government regulations.
Williams cited sources for his statement that Europe, Korea, and especially China have lost manufacturing jobs. He also cited the industries where manufacturing output (though not jobs) has increased in the U.S. You have responded not with facts or sources to refute his statements but with name-calling and ridicule. If you have data refuting the column’s assertion that China has also shed manufacturing jobs, please share it. Otherwise, more ridicule and name-calling might make you seem like the more intelligent and credible participant in the discussion.
When you don't have the facts on your side, the best approach is to call people names.
Yup. Greater government control of industry and individuals will create the level playing field some believe exists. The history of big government proves this to be true. Anyone who thinks an economy being driven by hundreds of millions of people making billions of transactions in their own self-interest is an ignorant globalist. We need government bureaucrats to tell us what to do so that we can achieve fairness. Not only do we need equal opportunity, we need equal outcome. Profit isn't fair. Occupy small government!!!
Of course they are. They want their welfare state. Are you of the opinion that we should join them? You get the government, economy and standard of living that you deserve. With millions of new Muslims pouring into the country, that have no job skills or motivation, other than a desire for jihad, I'm certain that the Germans are going to get everything they deserve.
My assumption is that Americans will have less money to spend on all goods.
They will spend the same amount but get less product.
That's called a lower standard of living.
The tariff will balance the budget
Which tariff?
balance trade deficits,
Why do we need to do that?
secure the dollar
Huh?
and increase buying power.
"They will spend the same amount but get less product"
You're contradicting yourself in the same paragraph.
Free traders either do or don’t realize we’re being frog-marched into socialism via the ballot box by the bad results of their policies. You really have to be stupendously insular not to realize what’s going on.
They’re either dishonest or wrong, and the common thread with them seems to be a pathological hatred of nation-states.
They conveniently ignore the fact that the nation-state was a solution to even worse problems like warlords and raiders.
Wouldn’t automation done here would still be preferable to moving factories overseas - so long as the robots are made here, and the implementation is being done by Americans?
It is called inflation. Consumption taxes are better than income taxes. Tariff being the premier consumption tax. We have to pay the piper now, to wait means to lose everything; But Free Traders can't see that. No instead they will run the USA into the ground and start GD II followed by full blown socialism. I didn't say repatriation of industry and ending insane Free Trade(de industrialization) would be painless.
PS: Balancing the trade deficit will strengthen the dollar so imports will eventually cost less over time. It will take a while to correct the damage that globalist anti American trade policies have done to the USA. There will be pain.
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