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Romney Still Doesn’t Get It
What Romney just told his major donors is not clear.
There is no tape as there was of the infamous 47% remarks, when he said that 47% of the voters wouldn’t vote for him because they were dependent on government largesse. In this case, he seems to have said that Hispanics and young people in particular got “gifts” from President Obama that brought them over to his side. The remarks at least skirt the 47% argument even if they don’t repeat it.
Romney later apologized for the 47% comment and said that it was ” all wrong.” It was all wrong. Let’s imagine for a moment that instead of saying that 47% were unlikely to vote for him because of dependence on the government, he had instead said that President Obama was trying to buy votes. That would not have embarrassed him if it had come out. And it would have put the blame where it belongs, with the politicians, not the voters. Voters do not have a direct say in these programs. And once they are enacted into law, they will use them just as Romney uses business and charitable deductions for himself.
What were the big “gifts” that Romney allegedly cited as giving Obama his winning edge? Romney said that young people were swayed by the president’s keeping student loan rates low and by allowing them via Obamacare to stay on their parents insurance policy until age 26. He said that lower income people were swayed by the hope of getting free medical care.
But the truth in all this is really quite different. The federal government borrows money at negligible rates and then re-lends it to students at much higher rates. The profit is booked in the federal accounts as “deficit reduction.” So the students, who will inherit all the accumulated deficits, have to pay much higher than necessary student loan rates to help reduce the deficit. Why didn’t Romney mention this scam?
As for Obamacare, it requires young people to buy health insurance they don’t need so that older people, who on average have 47 times as much money as the young, can pay less for their insurance. This was practically declaring war on the young, yet Romney said nothing about that. The free medical care for lower income people will cost many of them their jobs. The hourly cost of Obamacare for a minimum wage worker with a family is estimated to be $5.50, almost as much as the minimum wage itself. Many employers will fire workers rather than pay it. And Obamacare will also produce fewer full time workers because the mandate penalty does not apply for part time workers. Why didn’t Romney point that out?
For much of the last two weeks of the election, Romney seemed to be trying to keep an imagined lead by avoiding controversial statements. Did his polling really tell him to avoid any of this?
The voters are not the problem. They are often confused, but they are also our only hope for the future. In recent decades, elite leaders such as Obama, Romney, and Bernanke have taken this country down the wrong road, and more elitist condescension we don’t need.
O”Reily says Romney Deserved to Lose.
Romney: Obama’s ‘gifts’ to key demographics helped him win.
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Would Romney Be Good for American Education?
By Andrew J. Coulson
Without picking a winner in last night’s debate, it’s fair to say that Mitt Romney avoided the sort of conspicuous gaffs that can sink a campaign. He may well become the next president of the United States. Would that be a good thing for American schoolchildren?
Yesterday, I faulted an op-ed the Governor wrote for consisting chiefly of vagaries—but perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. Given that the federal government has spent roughly $2 trillion on k-12 education since 1965 and achieved none of its objectives, a president who talks much but does less would be a decided improvement.
But there are a few specifics in Romney’s education white paper… and some of them are deeply disconcerting. Immediately after stressing that “states and localities are best-positioned to reform their education systems” the document reverses course and declares that “the federal government cannot ignore the troubled state of American K-12 education,” and “is uniquely positioned to provide financial support for the education of our neediest students and to require states and districts to tell the truth about how their schools and students are performing.”
Certainly the federal government should not ignore America’s educational woes, having contributed to many of them for over half a century. But the subsequent claims are untrue and do not follow from the first. It is simply false that federal government funding is “uniquely positioned” to improve the education of the neediest students. In fact, one of the flagship federal programs for helping these students, Head Start, has been proven to have no lasting benefits by the federal government’s own research. More broadly, there appears to be no link between federal K-12 spending patterns and the student achievement gaps by socio-economic status or race. Nor is there any evidence that the federal oversight introduced by the No Child Left Behind law (the “telling the truth” referred to above) improved achievement overall or narrowed the gaps.
To be fair, the document acknowledges the ineffectiveness of past and current federal programs, and so the claim that federal funding is “uniquely positioned” to help disadvantaged students could be read to apply only to the Romney campaign proposal of “attaching federal funding to the students it is intended to support rather than dispersing it to districts.” The idea is essentially to voucherize federal funds, allowing them to be used even at private schools, where permitted by state law.
The benefits of increasing parental choice and competition between schools are well supported by the evidence, but here again, the federal “uniqueness” claim is simply false. Federal funding is not unique or necessary to ensuring universal school choice. The states are fully capable of doing this themselves because private schooling is, on average, about two thirds the per-pupil cost of public schooling, and so even without the roughly ten percent of education funding that comes from the federal government, state-level private choice programs could serve everyone.
Even though federal involvement in state school choice programs is not necessary it could still be a good idea. But it isn’t. As I argued when a similar idea was floated by President G. W. Bush, federal regulations would almost certainly follow federal funding of the nation’s private schools, homogenizing them from coast to coast and thereby eliminating the educational diversity upon which any choice program must rely. Since writing that piece, I have conducted a statistical study of the regulations imposed by state-level private school choice programs and found that vouchers already impose a large and highly statistically significant extra burden of regulation on participating schools. This is a grave enough problem when the regulations affect just the private schools in a single state, but that pales in comparison to the damage that would be done by such regulations at the national level.
Universal private school choice can also be achieved via personal and “scholarship donation” tax credits, and these programs do not seem to carry with them the same regulatory pall. But there is no reason to run the risk of enacting such a program at the federal level. On the contrary, the growing diversity of school choice programs at the state level is an asset, allowing us to see which state policies do the most to expand educational freedom and improve quality and efficiency. The best can then be replicated and the worst reformed.
Governor Romney says that he understands the free enterprise system, and knows that trickle-down government doesn’t work. He says that he wants to uphold our nation’s founding principles. Well, the evidence is clear that there is no need for or benefit to federal government intervention in state education policy and that there are in fact very grave risks to such intervention. And though it is unfashionable to draw attention to this fact, neither the word education nor the word school is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. So if Governor Romney becomes President Romney, American schoolchildren will be very lucky if he remembers these facts, and uses the presidential bully pulpit to promote more and better state-level school choice programs rather than opening the Pandora’s Box of federal funding and regulation of private schools.
Would Romney Be Good for American Education? is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Has Mitt Romney Ditched His Neoconservative Talking Points?
By Christopher Preble
We don’t want another Iraq, we don’t want another Afghanistan. That’s not the right course for us. – Mitt Romney, Presidential Debate, Boca Raton, Florida, October 22, 2012
With these words, Mitt Romney might have made the final, crucial connection to an American public tired of more than a decade of war, and desperate not to start any new ones.
Obama did his best to remind voters of why they haven’t trusted Republicans on foreign policy since 2005. He uttered the word Iraq 10 times. Romney mentioned it three times, once by accident—referring mistakenly to “the president of Iraq—excuse me, of Iran”— and once to explicitly and categorically deny that he had any intentions of going back down that road by launching another war.
Such sentiments can’t make Romney’s neoconservative advisers happy. They are the ones who sold the war in the first place, they peddled a “surge” in a desperate attempt to create a narrative that resembled victory, and it is they, who, to this day, proudly declare that the war was worth fighting. Their every statement betrays how truly marginalized they are, isolated from a public that can see the facts plainly before it, and concludes something very different: this war was a horrible mistake, and one that we are determined not to repeat. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal all but avoided commenting on the substance of Romney’s statements last night—probably because there wasn’t much substance.
Questions remain, however. First, is Mitt Romney truly committed to avoiding Iraq-style wars in the future? If so, why did he choose to surround himself with so many of the war’s most fervent advocates? Second, why is he opposed to additional reductions in the Army and Marine Corps, forces that grew specifically to fight the war that was supposed to be a “cakewalk” but that turned out to be something very different? If Mitt Romney doesn’t intend to engage in costly, open-ended nation-building missions abroad, why does he need a conventional military geared for that purpose? And, third, what lessons from the Iraq war inform his conduct of foreign policy? Was Iraq a good idea, poorly executed, or was this a bad idea from the get-go?
A recent article explained how Romney wanted to draw distinctions between himself and President George W. Bush, starting with the war in Iraq. “The idea that Romney is following the George W. Bush approach is a caricature the Democrats want to draw,” a senior Romney foreign policy adviser told the Los Angeles Times‘s Paul Richter, “We’re not going to help them with that.”
They didn’t last night. We’ll find out soon enough if it worked.
Has Mitt Romney Ditched His Neoconservative Talking Points? is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
American • Obama And Romney Both Favor A One World Economic System Tha
Obama And Romney Both Favor A One World Economic System That Kills American Jobs
Either way this election turns out, American jobs are going to continue to get slaughtered by the millions. During this campaign, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have both attempted to portray each other as the "outsourcer in chief". Unfortunately, they are both right. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have both participated in the outsourcing of American jobs, and both are openly admitting to the American people that they favor the emerging one world economic system which will continue to destroy millions of American jobs. In fact, they argue with each other about which of them will be more aggressive in pursuing more "free trade" agreements over the next four years. Unfortunately, the "free trade" agreements that the U.S. government enters into are never "fair trade" agreements. As a result, over the past decade we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of national wealth. This year alone, we will buy about half a trillion dollars more stuff from the rest of the world than they will buy from us. This trade deficit will be about 7 times larger than the trade deficit of any other nation on earth. Our economy will continue to bleed jobs at a horrifying pace, but Obama and Romney insist that the answer to our problems is even more "free trade". What makes all of this even more dreadful is that most Americans continue to fall for this nonsense.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that merging our labor pool with the labor pools of nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages was going to kill American jobs and drive down wages for the jobs that remain in the United States.
Why should some giant predator corporation pay you 15 dollars an hour plus benefits when they can pay a worker on the other side of the planet a dollar an hour with no benefits to do the same job?
During the second presidential debate, when Obama was asked why high tech products such as the iPhone could not be made here in the United States, Obama openly admitted that there are some jobs that aren’t ever going to come back.
But why does that have to be so?
Why can’t those jobs come back to America?
It seems to me that if you cracked down on nations that are cheating such as China, imposed a system of common sense tariffs and cut the corporate tax rate to a level more consistent with the rest of the world that you could get a lot of those jobs flooding back in by the end of next year.
But Obama is so blinded by his faith in the emerging one world economy that such measures are unimaginable to him.
In recent years, the Obama administration has entered into new "free trade" agreements with Panama, South Korea and Colombia. In addition, the Obama administration is making the Trans-Pacific Partnership ("the NAFTA of the Pacific") a very high priority.
Considering what a nightmare the first NAFTA was, do we really need another one?
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a treaty that would essentially ban all "Buy American" laws. It is being touted as one of the most comprehensive "free trade" agreements in history, and it would open up the door for millions more good jobs to be shipped out of the country.
The workers of America simply cannot afford another four years of Barack Obama.
In fact, the Obama administration has actually spent billions of taxpayer dollars to create jobs in other countries. The following is from a pro-Republican website…
Over his four years in office, Obama promised that he would focus on creating "jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced." However, as he racked up trillions in new debt, billions of dollars did go to create jobs that were outsourced or spent overseas. Whether it is electric cars made in Finland or solar panels in Mexico, taxpayers would be astonished to learn that their hard earned money went abroad for jobs that weren’t created in the United States.
You can get all the details right here. Needless to say, the Obama administration has been an absolute disaster on these issues.
So would Romney be an improvement when it comes to trade?
That is very doubtful.
The truth is that Mitt Romney was involved in outsourcing jobs while he was at Bain Capital. The following is from a recent article posted on Forbes.com…
David Corn of Mother Jones reports that “according to government documents . . . Romney, when he was in charge of Bain [Capital], invested heavily in a Chinese manufacturing company that depended on US outsourcing for its profits—and that explicitly stated that such outsourcing was crucial to its success.”
This didn’t happen after 1999, when Mitt Romney says he left Bain Capital to run the Salt Lake City Olympics (Corn was one of the first reporters to raise questions, now gaining wide exposure, of whether Romney really left Bain then), but the year before. On April 17, 1998, Brookside Capital Partners Fund, a Bain Capital affiliate of which Romney was the sole shareholder, sole director, president, and chief executive, invested an estimated $14.2 million in Global-Tech, an appliance maker in Dongguan, China. Global-Tech made products for American companies like Sunbeam, Hamilton Beach, Mr. Coffee, and Proctor-Silex. In September 1998 Global-Tech’s CEO announced that the company was postponing a factory expansion because Sunbeam was slowing its rate of outsourcing, and said, “Although it appears that customers such as Sunbeam are not outsourcing their manufacturing as quickly as we had anticipated, we still believe that the long-term trend toward outsourcing will continue.”
Since Romney left, Bain Capital has become even more aggressive with outsourcing jobs. In fact, Bain Capital has been forcing American workers to train their Chinese replacements even in the midst of this campaign. Aren’t they concerned that they are making their former boss look bad? The following is from an article written by an American worker that is having his job shipped to China by Bain Capital…
On Monday, November 5th Bain Capital is outsourcing my job to China. On Tuesday, November 6th I’m casting my vote against Mitt Romney.
Yes, I blame Mitt Romney for the loss of my job. Here’s why.
I’ve worked at the same factory in Freeport, Ill. for thirty-three years, making sensors and controls for the auto industry. It’s tough work, but it pays a living wage with health benefits that folks can count on, and it fuels our town’s economy and tax base.
That’s been changing since Bain Capital came to town. Two years ago, our factory was sold to Sensata Technologies, a company created by Bain Capital, and they told us that by December 2012, all 170 of our jobs would be shipped to China. They even made us train our Chinese replacements.
Layoff notices have been sent out, and some folks have already been laid off. Where there was once lots of people and energy and life, now there’s only the discoloration on the floor where the machinery used to be. It’s depressing. They’re not just dismantling the equipment and the plant; they’re dismantling our community.
All of this outsourcing is killing America.
Back in 1950, the population of this country was less than half of what it is now, and yet there were more Americans working in manufacturing back in 1950 than there are today.
The decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States has been really dramatic since the year 2000.
In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million…
I think that it is interesting to note that China joined the WTO in 2001. Since that time we have been losing jobs to them at an astounding pace. According to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, U.S. trade with China "cost more than 2.7 million jobs between 2001 and 2011".
The Chinese slap huge tariffs on many of our goods, they manipulate currency rates to make sure that U.S. companies cannot compete, they steal our intellectual property and they deeply subsidize their own businesses.
And yet Obama and Romney insist that this is "free trade".
What a joke.
And our tax structure is absolutely killing us as well. The following is from a recent article by Ernest F. Hollings…
A U.S. manufacturer exporting to China pays the 35% Corporate Tax and a 17% VAT when its exports reach Shanghai. A China manufacturer exports tax free to the U.S.
Are you starting to get the picture?
Our trade policy is a complete and total disaster, and yet Obama and Romney continue to insist that we just need to become even more integrated with the emerging one world economic system.
Well, in a previous article I listed 22 statistics which prove that the current path that we are on has been absolutely disastrous for American workers…
#1 One professor has estimated that cutting the U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.
#2 The United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 7 times larger than any other nation on earth has.
#3 Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the globe since 1975. That 8 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. businesses and pay the wages of U.S. workers. Federal, state and local taxes would have been paid on that 8 trillion dollars if it had stayed in the United States.
#4 When NAFTA was passed in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. In 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.
#5 In 2001, American consumers spent 102 billion dollars on products made in China. In 2011, American consumers spent 399 billion dollars on products made in China.
#6 The Chinese undervalue their currency by about 40 percent in order to gain a critical advantage over foreign competitors. This means that many Chinese companies are able to absolutely thrive while their competition in the United States goes out of business. The following is from a recent Fox News article….
To keep Chinese products artificially inexpensive on US store shelves, Beijing undervalues the yuan by 40 percent. It pirates US technology, subsidizes exports and imposes high tariffs on imports.
#7 According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.
#8 The U.S. trade deficit with China during 2011 was 295.4 billion dollars. That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
#9 Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was only about 6 million dollars (million with an "m") for the entire year.
#10 U.S. consumers spend about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that Chinese consumers spend on goods and services from the United States.
#11 The United States has actually lost an average of about 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
#12 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing about half a million jobs to China every single year.
#13 The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.
#14 During 2010 alone, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities closed their doors in America every single day.
#15 Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.
#16 As I have written about previously, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.
#17 According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.
#18 The percentage of working age Americans that are employed right now is actually smaller than it was at the end of the last recession.
#19 The average duration of unemployment in the United States is nearly three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.
#20 Due in part to the globalization of the labor pool, only about 24 percent of all jobs in the United States are "good jobs" at this point.
#21 Without enough good jobs, more Americans than ever before are falling into poverty. Today, more than 100 million Americans are on welfare.
#22 In recent years the U.S. economy has embraced "free trade" and the emerging one world economy like never before. Instead of increasing the number of jobs in our economy, it has resulted in the worst stretch of job creation in the United States in modern history….
If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.
At this point, more than 41 percent of all working age Americans do not have a job, and the vast majority of the new jobs that are being created are low paying jobs.
Median household income has fallen for four years in a row. In fact, median household income is down by more than $4000 since Barack Obama entered the White House.
One recent survey found that about 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings. We are a country that is full of broke people.
What we need are more good jobs. But Obama and Romney are both determined to keep shipping good jobs out of the country.
The path that we are on will only lead to disaster. Please wake up America.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/arch … rican-jobs
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun Oct 21, 2012 7:48 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
Obama And Romney Both Favor A One World Economic System That Kills American Jobs
Either way this election turns out, American jobs are going to continue to get slaughtered by the millions. During this campaign, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have both attempted to portray each other as the “outsourcer in chief“. Unfortunately, they are both right. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have both participated in the outsourcing of American jobs, and both are openly admitting to the American people that they favor the emerging one world economic system which will continue to destroy millions of American jobs. In fact, they argue with each other about which of them will be more aggressive in pursuing more “free trade” agreements over the next four years. Unfortunately, the “free trade” agreements that the U.S. government enters into are never “fair trade” agreements. As a result, over the past decade we have lost tens of thousands of businesses, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of national wealth. This year alone, we will buy about half a trillion dollars more stuff from the rest of the world than they will buy from us. This trade deficit will be about 7 times larger than the trade deficit of any other nation on earth. Our economy will continue to bleed jobs at a horrifying pace, but Obama and Romney insist that the answer to our problems is even more “free trade”. What makes all of this even more dreadful is that most Americans continue to fall for this nonsense.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that merging our labor pool with the labor pools of nations where it is legal to pay slave labor wages was going to kill American jobs and drive down wages for the jobs that remain in the United States.
Why should some giant predator corporation pay you 15 dollars an hour plus benefits when they can pay a worker on the other side of the planet a dollar an hour with no benefits to do the same job?
During the second presidential debate, when Obama was asked why high tech products such as the iPhone could not be made here in the United States, Obama openly admitted that there are some jobs that aren’t ever going to come back.
But why does that have to be so?
Why can’t those jobs come back to America?
It seems to me that if you cracked down on nations that are cheating such as China, imposed a system of common sense tariffs and cut the corporate tax rate to a level more consistent with the rest of the world that you could get a lot of those jobs flooding back in by the end of next year.
But Obama is so blinded by his faith in the emerging one world economy that such measures are unimaginable to him.
In recent years, the Obama administration has entered into new “free trade” agreements with Panama, South Korea and Colombia. In addition, the Obama administration is making the Trans-Pacific Partnership (“the NAFTA of the Pacific“) a very high priority.
Considering what a nightmare the first NAFTA was, do we really need another one?
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a treaty that would essentially ban all “Buy American” laws. It is being touted as one of the most comprehensive “free trade” agreements in history, and it would open up the door for millions more good jobs to be shipped out of the country.
The workers of America simply cannot afford another four years of Barack Obama.
In fact, the Obama administration has actually spent billions of taxpayer dollars to create jobs in other countries. The following is from a pro-Republican website…
Over his four years in office, Obama promised that he would focus on creating “jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.” However, as he racked up trillions in new debt, billions of dollars did go to create jobs that were outsourced or spent overseas. Whether it is electric cars made in Finland or solar panels in Mexico, taxpayers would be astonished to learn that their hard earned money went abroad for jobs that weren’t created in the United States.
You can get all the details right here. Needless to say, the Obama administration has been an absolute disaster on these issues.
So would Romney be an improvement when it comes to trade?
That is very doubtful.
The truth is that Mitt Romney was involved in outsourcing jobs while he was at Bain Capital. The following is from a recent article posted on Forbes.com…
David Corn of Mother Jones reports that “according to government documents . . . Romney, when he was in charge of Bain [Capital], invested heavily in a Chinese manufacturing company that depended on US outsourcing for its profits—and that explicitly stated that such outsourcing was crucial to its success.”
This didn’t happen after 1999, when Mitt Romney says he left Bain Capital to run the Salt Lake City Olympics (Corn was one of the first reporters to raise questions, now gaining wide exposure, of whether Romney really left Bain then), but the year before. On April 17, 1998, Brookside Capital Partners Fund, a Bain Capital affiliate of which Romney was the sole shareholder, sole director, president, and chief executive, invested an estimated $14.2 million in Global-Tech, an appliance maker in Dongguan, China. Global-Tech made products for American companies like Sunbeam, Hamilton Beach, Mr. Coffee, and Proctor-Silex. In September 1998 Global-Tech’s CEO announced that the company was postponing a factory expansion because Sunbeam was slowing its rate of outsourcing, and said, “Although it appears that customers such as Sunbeam are not outsourcing their manufacturing as quickly as we had anticipated, we still believe that the long-term trend toward outsourcing will continue.”
Since Romney left, Bain Capital has become even more aggressive with outsourcing jobs. In fact, Bain Capital has been forcing American workers to train their Chinese replacements even in the midst of this campaign. Aren’t they concerned that they are making their former boss look bad? The following is from an article written by an American worker that is having his job shipped to China by Bain Capital…
On Monday, November 5th Bain Capital is outsourcing my job to China. On Tuesday, November 6th I’m casting my vote against Mitt Romney.
Yes, I blame Mitt Romney for the loss of my job. Here’s why.
I’ve worked at the same factory in Freeport, Ill. for thirty-three years, making sensors and controls for the auto industry. It’s tough work, but it pays a living wage with health benefits that folks can count on, and it fuels our town’s economy and tax base.
That’s been changing since Bain Capital came to town. Two years ago, our factory was sold to Sensata Technologies, a company created by Bain Capital, and they told us that by December 2012, all 170 of our jobs would be shipped to China. They even made us train our Chinese replacements.
Layoff notices have been sent out, and some folks have already been laid off. Where there was once lots of people and energy and life, now there’s only the discoloration on the floor where the machinery used to be. It’s depressing. They’re not just dismantling the equipment and the plant; they’re dismantling our community.
All of this outsourcing is killing America.
Back in 1950, the population of this country was less than half of what it is now, and yet there were more Americans working in manufacturing back in 1950 than there are today.
The decline in manufacturing jobs in the United States has been really dramatic since the year 2000.
In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million…
I think that it is interesting to note that China joined the WTO in 2001. Since that time we have been losing jobs to them at an astounding pace. According to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute, U.S. trade with China “cost more than 2.7 million jobs between 2001 and 2011″.
The Chinese slap huge tariffs on many of our goods, they manipulate currency rates to make sure that U.S. companies cannot compete, they steal our intellectual property and they deeply subsidize their own businesses.
And yet Obama and Romney insist that this is “free trade”.
What a joke.
And our tax structure is absolutely killing us as well. The following is from a recent article by Ernest F. Hollings…
A U.S. manufacturer exporting to China pays the 35% Corporate Tax and a 17% VAT when its exports reach Shanghai. A China manufacturer exports tax free to the U.S.
Are you starting to get the picture?
Our trade policy is a complete and total disaster, and yet Obama and Romney continue to insist that we just need to become even more integrated with the emerging one world economic system.
Well, in a previous article I listed 22 statistics which prove that the current path that we are on has been absolutely disastrous for American workers…
#1 One professor has estimated that cutting the U.S. trade deficit in half would create 5 million more jobs in the United States.
#2 The United States has a trade imbalance that is more than 7 times larger than any other nation on earth has.
#3 Overall, the United States has run a trade deficit of more than 8 trillion dollars with the rest of the globe since 1975. That 8 trillion dollars could have gone to support U.S. businesses and pay the wages of U.S. workers. Federal, state and local taxes would have been paid on that 8 trillion dollars if it had stayed in the United States.
#4 When NAFTA was passed in 1993, the United States had a trade surplus with Mexico of 1.6 billion dollars. In 2010, we had a trade deficit with Mexico of 61.6 billion dollars.
#5 In 2001, American consumers spent 102 billion dollars on products made in China. In 2011, American consumers spent 399 billion dollars on products made in China.
#6 The Chinese undervalue their currency by about 40 percent in order to gain a critical advantage over foreign competitors. This means that many Chinese companies are able to absolutely thrive while their competition in the United States goes out of business. The following is from a recent Fox News article….
To keep Chinese products artificially inexpensive on US store shelves, Beijing undervalues the yuan by 40 percent. It pirates US technology, subsidizes exports and imposes high tariffs on imports.
#7 According to the New York Times, a Jeep Grand Cherokee that costs $27,490 in the United States costs about $85,000 in China thanks to all the tariffs.
#8 The U.S. trade deficit with China during 2011 was 295.4 billion dollars. That was the largest trade deficit that one nation has had with another nation in the history of the world.
#9 Back in 1985, our trade deficit with China was only about 6 million dollars (million with an “m”) for the entire year.
#10 U.S. consumers spend about 4 dollars on goods and services from China for every one dollar that Chinese consumers spend on goods and services from the United States.
#11 The United States has actually lost an average of about 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
#12 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing about half a million jobs to China every single year.
#13 The United States has lost more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities since 2001.
#14 During 2010 alone, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities closed their doors in America every single day.
#15 Since the auto industry bailout, approximately 70 percent of all GM vehicles have been built outside the United States.
#16 As I have written about previously, 95 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were middle class jobs.
#17 According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades if current trends continue.
#18 The percentage of working age Americans that are employed right now is actually smaller than it was at the end of the last recession.
#19 The average duration of unemployment in the United States is nearly three times as long as it was back in the year 2000.
#20 Due in part to the globalization of the labor pool, only about 24 percent of all jobs in the United States are “good jobs” at this point.
#21 Without enough good jobs, more Americans than ever before are falling into poverty. Today, more than 100 million Americans are on welfare.
#22 In recent years the U.S. economy has embraced “free trade” and the emerging one world economy like never before. Instead of increasing the number of jobs in our economy, it has resulted in the worst stretch of job creation in the United States in modern history….
If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.
At this point, more than 41 percent of all working age Americans do not have a job, and the vast majority of the new jobs that are being created are low paying jobs.
Median household income has fallen for four years in a row. In fact, median household income is down by more than $4000 since Barack Obama entered the White House.
One recent survey found that about 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings. We are a country that is full of broke people.
What we need are more good jobs. But Obama and Romney are both determined to keep shipping good jobs out of the country.
The path that we are on will only lead to disaster. Please wake up America.
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Wall Street Journal: Romney Should Be a Neocon, but Hide It in Debate
By Justin Logan
Would you buy a foreign policy from this man?
Imagine a world in which the Iraq War had gone exactly as marketed. The United States invaded in March 2003. The Iraqis, with the help of Ahmed Chalabi, rapidly transitioned to become a stable, liberal democracy allied with the United States against Iran. The marvelous and smooth transformation had ripple effects throughout the region: a handful of Arab states followed suit, and the United States had drawn down to under 30,000 troops in country by September 2003, setting up a basing agreement with the new Iraqi government to stay indefinitely. Few American lives were lost, the swamp of terrorism was drained, and an oil pipeline has just been completed running from Iraq to the Israeli port city of Haifa.Imagine, at the same time, that opponents of the war, despite having gotten every major judgment about the prudence and consequences of the war comically wrong, had been vaulted to positions of power and prestige in foreign affairs commentary. Meanwhile, the war’s proponents, despite their support for a strategy that yielded huge strategic dividends for the United States at a low cost, were banished to the wilderness, heard from sporadically on a few blogs and at a think tank or two.
It would be strange, wouldn’t it?
And yet that situation is roughly analogous to the one in which we find ourselves today, except in real life the war was an enormous disaster, just as its opponents predicted, and the proponents of the war are the ones in denial about its implications. Foremost among the salespeople for war who have yet to come to grips with the facts are the members of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.
But hey, let’s let bygones be bygones: they’ve got some advice for Mitt Romney in his upcoming foreign policy debate.
First, the good news: Even the editorial board of the Journal seems to understand that speaking openly about their plans for more wars would be bad politics. Accordingly, the Journal doesn’t “expect Mr. Romney to offer an explicit defense of the Bush Doctrine” and they worry about the implications of Obama charging Romney with wanting to get the United States into a third (and fourth) Middle East war. This is in keeping with the previous assurance of Bret Stephens (pictured above) that Romney wouldn’t start any new wars. Romney should deny wanting any more wars while doing a number of things that make them inevitable.
Second, the bad news: Instead of suggesting that Romney actually trim the neocon sail a bit, the article suggests Romney continue his strategy of wheeling out a fog machine and saying “leadership” and “strength” instead of discussing details. The American people who tune in Monday night deserve to hear some specifics. Not the level of specifics that would satisfy the people who think about international politics for a living, sure, but some specifics. Instead, while suggesting that Romney “offer[] a serious critique of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy that doesn’t descend to clichés,” the article suggests clichés but not seriousness.
This blends with the ugly news: like an insular clique of Bourbon royalty, the neocons at the Journal appear to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing about strategy over the last 10 years. To the extent their suggestions do go beyond clichés, they are a reminder that Bush-era neoconservatism still lies at the center of their world view, and the world view of the Republican establishment. A few examples:
- The war in Iraq, we are informed, had “already been won when Mr. Obama became president.” Mission accomplished? Come again?
- Obama turned that win into a loss by failing to secure “a viable alliance with Baghdad and a bulwark against Tehran.” When you have allocated yourselves 1,608 words, you may want to show your work about how this could have happened.
- Another Obama failure is that he allowed Israel to have a partially independent defense strategy. He should have “provide[d] Israel with reassurances that it needn’t consider its own military options” on Iran. If Israelis should just rely on the United States to defend them from the most important threats facing their country, why does Israel have such a powerful military in the first place?
- Obama’s “policies of premature military withdrawals [in Iraq and Afghanistan] have increased rather than diminished the chances that we will be at war in the Middle East again.” How? In which countries?
One could go on. But more broadly the piece suffers from the flaw that has characterized the whole foreign-policy discussion in the election: the idea that the outside world begins at Algeria and ends at Afghanistan. The sprawling essay says exactly nothing useful when it comes to the most important foreign policy challenges facing the United States: the prospect of a European implosion, the wreckage of our war on drugs in Mexico, and preventing American entanglement in a prospective World War III in Asia.
The essay closes by invoking Robert Gates’s invocation of Ronald Reagan, who said that he had lived through many wars but none of them began because the United States was too strong. Gates and the WSJ’s editorial board probably ought to think a little harder about whether the United States blundered into any costly quagmires as a function of its overweening strength and insulation from the costs of its strategic choices. The answer is obvious.
Wall Street Journal: Romney Should Be a Neocon, but Hide It in Debate is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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Romney Derangement Syndrome Begins
By David Boaz
Back in 2003 psychiatrist-turned-columnist Charles Krauthammer “discovered” a new psychiatric syndrome:
Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.
I myself identified — but sadly, never in print — Bush Derangement Syndrome-II, the onset of unfounded enthusiasm for George W. Bush in people who otherwise supported smaller government. BDS-II manifested itself most publicly on February 8, 2008, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, when after seven disastrous years of overspending, federal intrusion, entitlement expansion, civil liberties abuses, and foundering wars — and indeed the day after Bush’s Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 passed Congress — President Bush spoke at CPAC, and the assembled conservatives greeted him with chants of “Four More Years!” Really? Four more years of that?
And of course I hardly have to mention Obama Derangement Syndrome, which found many people convinced that Barack Obama was a Kenyan, a Muslim, the son of Malcolm X, or some other wild fantasy.
Now, even before the current election, while Mitt Romney remains a 64-36 underdog on Intrade, I’m seeing the first signs of Romney Derangement Syndrome. Take this item on NPR this morning:
A woman in the audience named Mary Ann … says she’s not impressed by Governor Romney’s claim that he recruited women to serve in his Cabinet in Massachusetts.
“Yes, he hired women, and I’m thinking to myself yeah, because he could get them at a lower rate. That’s the only reason Mitt Romney hired women.”
He hired women to serve in the state Cabinet, where I’m sure the salaries are set by law. And he wasn’t all that frugal with taxpayers’ dollars anyway. And yet Mary Ann just can’t imagine that Romney would hire women for top positions — positions that would play an important role in his success as governor — unless “he could get them at a lower rate.”
Romney Derangement Syndrome. You read it here first.
Romney Derangement Syndrome Begins is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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What Would a President Romney Do on Trade?
By Simon Lester
Perhaps I shouldn’t take campaign promises too seriously. But candidates say things, and my natural reaction is to assume they mean them. I have been proved wrong before, and perhaps I’m falling into the same old trap, but I’m going to assume Governor Romney means at least a little of what he said on trade in last night’s debate.
Based on what he said, I’m going to talk briefly about what a President Romney would (might?) do on trade. Let me focus on two issues: Trade with Latin America, and China’s alleged currency manipulation.
Trade with Latin America
Last night, Governor Romney said:
I’m also going to dramatically expand trade in Latin America. It’s been growing about 12 percent per year over a long period of time. I want to add more free trade agreements so we have more trade.
This all sounds great. He is saying positive things about free trade. Excellent. But what does he mean?
Latin America runs from Mexico down to Argentina. So far, we have trade agreements with: Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru. So who’s left? Venezuela is obviously not a great candidate. And Argentina isn’t either — they’ve been quite protectionist and inward-looking recently. So what major trading partners are we talking about? Brazil is the most obvious one. But U.S.-Brazil trade frictions are said to have played a big part in killing the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas in the 1990s, and those frictions are still pretty high today, with, among other things, Brazil complaining about U.S. monetary policy driving down the value of our currency (see below for more on currency issues).
I’m all for free trade with Latin America, and I’m happy to hear Romney supporting it. But in practice, it’s not clear how much can be achieved.
China’s Alleged Currency Manipulation
This issue has been discussed ad nauseam already, but let me make a quick political point. Here’s what Romney said last night:
China has been a currency manipulator for years and years and years. And the president has a regular opportunity to — to label them as a — as a currency manipulator but refuses to do so. On day one, I will label China a currency manipulator, which will allow me as president to be able to put in place, if necessary, tariffs where I believe that they are taking unfair advantage of our manufacturers.
My colleague Dan Ikenson explains here why Romney shouldn’t follow through with this, and I agree. But what I want to focus on is what he will do, because, as is probably obvious, politicians don’t always do what they should!
It seems to me that Romney has dug in pretty deeply on the issue of labeling China a currency manipulator. I can’t see how he can step back from that without some major embarrassment. As a result, I think that, if elected, he will do something on day one that can be characterized as “labeling China a currency manipulator”. (He has mentioned an executive order, but it’s more complicated than that, as the Secretary of Treasury needs to be involved, too). But the dirty little secret here is that labeling China a currency manipulator just triggers consultations on the issue. Which is why, actually, I think Romney is pushing this — he knows it doesn’t mean much.
But then you’ve got the issue of imposing tariffs on China as a response, presumably by instructing the Department of Commerce to change its method of calculating countervailing duties, so as to provide for extra duties on Chinese goods based on the currency practices. This would be a more serious action (and would probably violate WTO rules), one that would have a direct impact on prices of Chinese imports (it would raise them!).
But look at the language Romney uses here. He says he will do this “if necessary”. Here, then, he leaves himself wiggle room. He can take some time to negotiate with China, study the issue, and ultimately decide that the tariffs are unnecessary.
For whatever that’s worth, which may not be much, that’s my guess as to how the Romney team is thinking about this issue.
What Would a President Romney Do on Trade? is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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Romney Sidesteps Questions on Locking Up Citizens
By Tim Lynch
That’s the story in today’s Washington Times.
Here’s an excerpt:
Mitt Romney sidestepped questions Wednesday about whether he would have signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that authorizes the indefinite detention of terror suspects, including American citizens, saying he didn’t have enough information on the law.
Responding to a question at a town hall style meeting at a large manufacturer here, the Republican presidential nominee said he will take a look “at that particular piece of legislation” and said that when it comes to the issue of indefinite detention he would try to strike a balance between protecting personal liberties and protecting the nation from terrorist attacks.
Romney Sidesteps Questions on Locking Up Citizens is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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Mitt Romney Will ‘Champion Free Trade’
By Simon Lester
Putting all of his China-bashing aside for a moment, Mitt Romney announced the following in a speech on Monday:
I will champion free trade and restore it as a critical element of our strategy, both in the Middle East and across the world. The President has not signed one new free trade agreement in the past four years. I will reverse that failure. I will work with nations around the world that are committed to the principles of free enterprise, expanding existing relationships and establishing new ones.
The point about President Obama not signing “new” free trade agreements is kind of a technicality. He did sign some, but the negotiations originated with the Bush administration, so they weren’t “new,” according to Romney.
But I’m more interested in Romney’s “championing” of free trade. Which nations will he be negotiating with? He mentions countries that “are committed to the principles of free enterprise.” That kind of sounds like the language used by California Rep. Devin Nunes, which I mentioned last week. Nunes proposes starting free trade negotiations with the EU and Brazil. Is this what Romney has in mind as well? As noted in my earlier post, I’m pretty skeptical of the chances of success for both of these. But Romney doesn’t get that specific in terms of trading partners, so I’m not sure exactly what he intends. Even more reason to be skeptical.
Mitt Romney Will ‘Champion Free Trade’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty – Cato Institute Blog
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