free trade working to make everyone poorer
#1 The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001. About 75 percent of those factories employed over 500 people when they were still in operation.
#2 Dell Inc., one of America’s largest manufacturers of computers, has announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an investment of over $100 billion over the next decade.
#3 Dell has announced that it will be closing its last large U.S. manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in November. Approximately 900 jobs will be lost.
#4 In 2008, 1.2 billion cellphones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States? Zero.
#5 According to a new study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, if the U.S. trade deficit with China continues to increase at its current rate, the U.S. economy will lose over half a million jobs this year alone.
#6 As of the end of July, the U.S. trade deficit with China had risen 18 percent compared to the same time period a year ago.
#7 The United States has lost a total of about 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since October 2000.
#8 According to Tax Notes, between 1999 and 2008 employment at the foreign affiliates of U.S. parent companies increased an astounding 30 percent to 10.1 million. During that exact same time period, U.S. employment at American multinational corporations declined 8 percent to 21.1 million.
#9 In 1959, manufacturing represented 28 percent of U.S. economic output. In 2008, it represented 11.5 percent.
#10 Ford Motor Company recently announced the closure of a factory that produces the Ford Ranger in St. Paul, Minnesota. Approximately 750 good paying middle class jobs are going to be lost because making Ford Rangers in Minnesota does not fit in with Ford’s new “global” manufacturing strategy.
#11 As of the end of 2009, less than 12 million Americans worked in manufacturing. The last time less than 12 million Americans were employed in manufacturing was in 1941.
#12 In the United States today, consumption accounts for 70 percent of GDP. Of this 70 percent, over half is spent on services.
#13 The United States has lost a whopping 32 percent of its manufacturing jobs since the year 2000.
#14 In 2001, the United States ranked fourth in the world in per capita broadband Internet use. Today it ranks 15th.
#15 Manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is actually lower in 2010 than it was in 1975.
#16 Printed circuit boards are used in tens of thousands of different products. Asia now produces 84 percent of them worldwide.
#17 The United States spends approximately $3.90 on Chinese goods for every $1 that the Chinese spend on goods from the United States.
#18 One prominent economist is projecting that the Chinese economy will be three times larger than the U.S. economy by the year 2040.
#19 The U.S. Census Bureau says that 43.6 million Americans are now living in poverty and according to them that is the highest number of poor Americans in the 51 years that records have been kept.
Categorized | Featured Articles
Have You Noticed These Signs Of Deindustrialization?
Posted on September 30, 2010.
This has nothing to do with “deindustrialization.”
It’s called failing companies and outsourcing.
The USA became a prosperous nation 100 years ago because we were the king of globalization.
What is happening today? Jobs leaving the USA, entire factories are shutting down and moving to foreign countries.
100 years ago, entire factories were moving to the USA. That’s what caused that huge wave of immigration, because the factory owners often brought all their workers with them, paying their way in steerage on a steamer ship.
Why?
Tariffs. Tariffs on imports were the main source of revenues for the federal government. Income tax was unconstitutional until 1913, when Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment. So tariffs were paying for most of the federal budget before then.
Tariffs raised the prices of imported goods, and it was harder for foreign factories to compete. So they moved their factories here, to avoid paying the tariff.
Tariffs were the successful way of managing globalization, and it turned the global economy in our favor. We became an indudstrial superpower exporter in 1880, and we became a creditor nation in 1914, because of 100 years of tariffs.
Tariffs also eliminated slavery. Look up the Tariff of 1828. Slave states hated tariffs. Slavery was holding us back, we had to abolish slavery before we became prosperous.
We ended tariffs in 1913 and replaced them with income tax, because exporters should not have tariffs. Once you reach that level of prosperity, you become vulnerable to retaliation from your customer nations. That’s why the Smoot-Hawley tariff backfired in 1930. We were still an exporter, and other nations retaliated.
But that all ended when we lost our trade surplus in 1980, and we became a debtor nation again in 1988.
It was time to go back to tariffs during the 1980’s. But the wealthy Wall Street Journal types were salivating over the idea of opening sweatshops in emerging Asian nations, so they raised the bogeyman of Smoot-Hawley to scare us away from tariffs.
The result has been an economy spiraling out of control. Our trade deficit is now equal to our total exports, which is more than ever in our entire history. We send out a trillion dollars a year on our trade deficit, which adds a trillion dollars of debt to our current account balance every year. The national personal savings rate was 4% in 1930, and it peaked at 10% in 1980. Today it is negative.
Our economy is now in crisis, unemployment is hovering around 10%, and our government is racking up staggering debts, from wars and stimulus giveaways that will never be paid back by the recipients. That means higher taxes in the future, which will only push us down deeper into the pit.
Free trade is making us a beggar nation.
Tariffs made us a prosperous nation.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what we’re doing wrong.
Source(s):
World Almanac 2009
Tariff of 1789, 1790, 1792, 1816, 1824, 1828, 1832, 1833, 1842, 1857, 1883
Revenue Act of 1894, 1913
Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
No problem.
We can all run travel agencies to handle the travel arrangements for all of our vacations that we can’t afford to take.
Ownership Society Baby!
Gee, thanks, you sure harshed my mello.
Outsourcing. Yes I have lived through it and it sucks.