Finally: A President-elect Fighting for Workers
FINE-AH-LEE … we have a public official – who, I might add, isn’t even a public official yet – not making excuses but, instead, FIGHTING for every American job: “Donald Trump Targets Second Indiana Plant Over Plans to Shift to Mexico”
This morning, he took to Twitter, writing …
“The U.S. is going to substantialy (sic) reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but any business that leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell its product back into the U.S. without retribution or consequence, is WRONG! There will be a tax on our soon to be strong border of 35% for these companies wanting to sell their product, cars, A.C. units etc., back across the border. This tax will make leaving financially difficult, but…. these companies are able to move between all 50 states, with no tax or tariff being charged. Please be forewarned prior to making a very expensive mistake!”
You betcha. Bring … it … on …
If the President-elect can save these 300 jobs and add them to the 1,100 jobs saved at Carrier (plus the company’s $16M infrastructure investment) and the nearly 6,000 jobs at the Lincoln plant in Kentucky, that will be just shy of 7,500 jobs that were destine for Mexico but no longer are. But it isn’t just these jobs – according to the job creation formula, five to seven jobs are created around every manufacturing job (retail and service sectors deliver one to two more jobs for every job). So you can see why manufacturing is so important. And while others in power make excuses – “we can’t stop those jobs from leaving” – this not-yet-in-power official isn’t making excuses – he’s taking them on.
All told, roughly 36,000 to 51,000 jobs have been saved … so far. The guy hasn’t even been inaugurated yet … stunning …
As some of my long-time friends and political acquaintances already know, I’ve been studying trade policy since before NAFTA was approved in 1993. In 1993, Bob Baughman and I co-founded the New England Fair Trade Council, a nonprofit that for four years purchased advertising, held events, and spoke anyone and everyone who would allow us about the problems with the trade deals. We own copies of both the NAFTA and GATT/WTO agreements and spent our time studying them and tracking financial news about what happened in the wake of the passage of both treaties. In other words, for me, in another life, I was on the front lines trying to stop these trade deals.
On my weekly radio show at Tufts’ WMFO for nearly a decade, I spent countless hours on the radio – hundreds and hundreds of hours – talking about these issues, interviewing leaders in the field, and also writing about trade issues on a monthly companion newsletter I had for my radio show. The great leaders in this movement, both Democrats and Republicans, understood, simply, that a superpower should not allow its manufacturing base to be hollowed out and that tens of millions of citizens need decent wage, low skill work to survive. The nation can’t educate ourselves, with “free” everything that isn’t actually free, out of this economic crisis (and now, as has been shown, many rocket scientists, bankers, and folks in doctorate degree crowd are out of work, too). There is no wealth created in doing each other’s laundry. When one of your nation’s largest exports are trees and apples, but largest imports are products made with the trees and apple juice, there is a hug problem.
The data points are what they are, all from the federal government:
* A nosedive in the labor participation rate since the passage of both trade deals after the dot-con jobs bump;
* Nearly five million manufacturing jobs (25 million to 35 million) lost since 2000 (this doesn’t include the five years after those trade deals were implemented; the BLS has estimated those losses are in the multi-millions of jobs);
* Monthly trade deficits of $20 billion to $60 billion per month, for decades (and when you pull out the oil exports, these deficits are even larger) … Please, stop, think about it this way: The monthly trade deficit is the equivalent of 100,000 to 300,000 $200,000 condos or homes worth of wealth being shipped overseas … EVERY MONTH. It’s the equivalent of 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 Honda CR-Vs in wealth being shipped overseas. In one month, as an example, nearly every soldier in the armed services could get a free SUV. One month. That’s the value of the wealth that is leaving the nation. The 1.6 million people estimated to be homeless could get a free home with about 13 months worth of trade deficits. Again, that’s the value of the wealth that is leaving the country.
* This doesn’t even get into the federal budget deficit – now at $19.93 trillion dollars … 325 million people in America, 119 million actually paying income taxes, 152 million in the workforce – down 3.6 million from 2000 … a complete and utter bipartisan failure of the president and Congress for many, many years all because of a cultist belief that free-trade works when it doesn’t.
Oh, and you see that trade deficit swing back up between 2008 and 2009? That data point is actually a good one: It means the deficit dropped. However, ultimately, it was a bad one: That’s the Great Recession. People stopped spending money … because they didn’t have any money … to buy all the foreign products. Again, go back into the Google search wayback machine for the ships stuck in ports in Singapore from the time period, piled with goods made in free-trade slave sweatshops, not coming to America because we were too broke and maxed out on our cards to buy anything. Simply put, we are – through our consumerism and free-trade policy, that isn’t free – subsidizing the entire world while impoverishing our own people. And since nearly every country that are our main trading partners are socialist, with an elite class that is making out like bandits, their people are enslaved while a handful of people from these nations rise into the elite system. They are free-trade slaves. And lastly, no amount of taxing the rich, shifting money around between castes, subsidizing free education, etc., fixes this problem for us. None of it does: The rich simply don’t have enough money to take.
And, yeah, not to toot my own horn, but I predicted our current malaise more than 20 years ago. I have the audio tapes to prove it. Countless hours of them. I hoped I would be wrong; I’m actually distraught at the state of the nation’s economy and have been for a long time. I wasn’t wrong. I nailed it.
While I’m a local journalist and don’t cover trade issues at all, I’ve kept up with the information and data; it has been a horrifying hobby for me. And I – and many others – have been waiting for someone … friggin’ anyone … to realize what was going on around us and fight to stop it. It’s been a bipartisan problem and the solutions are also bipartisan, too.
It really is simple:
* Every private sector job matters and manufacturing jobs matter even more because of the job creation formula around those jobs;
* Elected officials have no business making the lives of working people worse with their burdensome regulations, uncompetitive tax policies, out-right bribery via campaign contributions to harm working people, and worshiping at the alter of the free-trade cult which has been shown time and time again to be failed public policy;
* Tariffs – whether used for revenue for the federal government, to protect our workers from foreign competition, or equalize those companies that stay in America – are constitutionally acceptable and have been for the entire history of the country. Tariffs were one of the main revenue generation sectors before the income tax in 1913 and were stabilized or altered, as needed, before the 1970s when they were nearly dropped to nothing.
The fact that both the left and the right are attacking what the President-elect is doing shows you everything you need to know about what is wrong with our country. Whether it’s embracing collapse to bring about socialism or being bought and paid for by the K Street crowd, you are all wrong. And yes, on trade policy, tough shit to the naysayers – the President-elect is going to try something different – and for that, we all thank you, Mr. President-elect.
Photo courtesy of DonaldJTrump.com. Graphic courtesy of TradingEconomics.com.