Well, he certainly says this:
If Canada and Mexico do not renegotiate NAFTA, said Hillary Clinton in the Cleveland debate, she would “opt out” of the trade treaty that was the legislative altarpiece of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Barack agreed. NAFTA is renegotiated, or NAFTA is gone.
Barack went further. He has denounced “open trucking,” the feature of NAFTA whereby Mexican trucks are to be free to roam the United States and compete with the Teamsters of Jim Hoffa’s union, which just endorsed him.
The trade issue is back, big-time. For to blue-collar workers in industrial states like Ohio, NAFTA is a code word for betrayal — a sellout of them and their families to CEOs panting to move production out of the United States to cheap-labor countries like Mexico and China.
Our workers’ instincts are backed up by stats. In 2007, the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico soared 16 percent to $73 billion, a record. Mexico now ships more cars to us now than we ship to the world. And where did Mexico get an auto industry?
The U.S. trade deficit with China shot up 10 percent to $256 billion, the largest trade deficit ever between any two countries.
Charles MacMillion of MBG Services has run the numbers.
In manufactures, the United States had a trade deficit of $499 billion in 2007, a slight improvement over the $526 billion record in 2006. Yet that trade deficit in manufactured goods with the world is more than twice as large as our $224 billion bill for OPEC’s oil.
Under Bush, the U.S. trade deficit has doubled. Three million manufacturing jobs have vanished. And America has begun to run a trade deficit in advanced technology goods of more than $50 billion.
Our trade deficit in advanced technology goods with China is $67 billion, eight times what it is with Japan.
“Free trade is essential to the creation of high-paying quality jobs,” said Bush on Thursday. But if exports create jobs (and they do), imports displace them. And if we import half a trillion dollars more in manufactures than we export, is not Bush trade policy literally slaughtering industrial jobs?
Is there not a correlation between $4.3 trillion in trade deficits under Bush, the 3 million manufacturing jobs lost under Bush, the fall of the dollar by 50 percent against the euro under Bush and the resurgence of inflation, signaled by a quadrupling of the price of gold, under Bush?
Neither Hillary nor Obama has laid out a new trade-and-tax policy to deal with the de-industrialization of America and our deepening dependency on foreign technology, manufactures and the loans to pay for them. But at least they are listening to the country.
John McCain seems blind and deaf to the crisis. In Michigan, he informed autoworkers their “jobs are not coming back” and explained his philosophy: “I’m a student of history. Every time the United States has become protectionist … we’ve paid a very heavy price.”
This is ahistorical nonsense. From 1860 to 1913, the United States was the most protectionist nation on earth and produced the most awesome growth of any nation in history. In 1860, the U.S. economy was half of Britain’s; in 1913, more than twice Britain’s.
In 1920, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge won a landslide, cut income taxes from Wilson’s 69 percent to 25 percent and doubled tariffs. America went on a tear. When Coolidge went home in 1929, the United States was producing 42 percent of the world’s manufactured goods.
Who were America’s protectionists?
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison moved the Tariff Act of 1789 through Congress. Aided by Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, President Madison enacted the Tariff of 1816 to protect U.S. infant industries from British dumping.
Abraham Lincoln used Morrill Tariff revenue to fight the Civil War. The 11 GOP presidents who followed, from 1865 to 1929, all protectionists, made America the greatest industrial power in history, with a standard of living never before seen. Mocking protectionism, McCain is repudiating Republican history and all its achievements up to the era of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
America rose to power behind a Republican tariff wall. What has free trade wrought? Lost sovereignty. A sinking dollar. A hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing. Stagnant wages. Wives forced into the labor market to maintain the family income. Mass indebtedness to foreign nations, and a deepening dependency on foreign goods and borrowings to pay for them. We have sacrificed our country on the altar of this Moloch, the mythical Global Economy.
It took Rip Van Republican 20 years to wake up to the disaster of open borders and five years to realize the folly of igniting wars in which no vital interest was at risk. How long before the GOP wakes up to the reality that globalism is not conservatism, never was, but is a pillar of Wilsonian liberalism, in whose vineyards our faux conservatives now daily labor.
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Outstanding article here, I hope that what you write is sent to every conservative news organization that stupidly pumps up "free trade" and "outsourcing" as moron-mantras to cure our current ills. Just as you point out, our historical understanding of how our economy grew, has been contorted by the politically-connected fools who benefit from sticking it to American workers.
ReplyDeleteProtectionism has been the heart of strong and growing economies across the world. China knows this well, as does Japan, as does even the EU, which is why these places all have some form of protectionist economic management that looks after their own workers first. Often at our expense, since our own politicians are such idiots.
Something interesting in this regard, for your files:
I was speaking with an old friend from college over the weekend, an engineer with whom I'd studied mechanical engineering well over a decade ago, about the best types of skills to obtain so as to survive the upcoming recession mess and possible long-term stagflation. His response, to my disbelief: "Learn German, and get ready to move."
Turns out that he is emigrating, with his wife and 3 children, out to Kassel in central Germany. Outsourcing has utterly destroyed the US domestic tech industry, and with the H1-B visa further decimating the earnings and jobs potential of US-trained scientists and engineers-- along with the plummeting dollar-- there is little future for technical professionals within the USA.
From what he was telling me, Germany has its own problems (and taxes) but at the very least, taxation there pays for excellent schools and public services, and the tech industry in the country is outstanding and booming. The country has precisely those kinds of nationalistic, protectionist laws that US Wilsonian free-traders scoff at, and immigration is generally restricted to skilled workers who have some kind of ancestral background in Germany or other Northern European nations with some kind of ancient connection to the German mainland.
IOW, the place looks after its own first, and it welcomes skilled Americans, Australians and Canadians with some Germanic connection in their ancestry.
Just like you say here, both the Left and the Right in the USA scorn Germany because of its "protectionism," yet it's precisely that protectionist impulse that has maintained Germany as a successful manufacturing and information technology center. Also, since so much of German output is in the high-tech and high-skill sector, the result is that Germany is far less vulnerably to currency swings-- its output is highly value-added.
Apparently my old friend is hardly the only one doing this-- there's almost a colony of ex-Americans and Australians now living in eastern Germany, where it's cheaper, and speaking German as well as the Germans do-- so perhaps this is where things are going. If this recession and stagflation hit as hard as people are saying, this is probably what to expect.