In his last year of office, President Bill Clinton called on Congress to make normal trade relations with China permanent. So legislation was introduced to the House on May 15, 2000 by Rep. William Reynolds Archer (R-Texas) with three co-sponsors — saying that permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with China was a top priority, and was vital to the U.S. agriculture market (to gain access to a market with one-fifth of the world’s population).
If anyone believes offshore outsourcing jobs is passé and not impacting U.S. labor markets think again. The Economic Policy Institute has published a new study showing America has lost millions of jobs to China's cheap labor market. From 2001 to 2013, the massive trade deficit with China has cost the United States 3.2 million jobs.
According to a new report, ever since Bill Clinton granted permanent normal trade relations to China, the U.S has lost over 64,000 manufacturing firms and at least 5.8 million manufacturing jobs.
Want to know how to create up to 5.8 million jobs in three years? End currency manipulation. So says a new study released from the Economic Policy Institute. If currency manipulation was stopped, the U.S. trade deficit would shrink by up to $500 billion in three years, annual GDP would increase up to $720 billion, the federal budget deficit would be reduced by $100 billion each year and 40% of the new jobs created would be in manufacturing.
We have heard a great deal this year about manufacturing coming back to the United States. We hear about the diminishing wage gap in some Asian countries and the possibility of lower U.S. energy prices.
Don't like the trade deficit, low GDP and the public outrage over the offshore outsourcing? Change the accounting method to make it go away! Such is the agenda of government statisticians it appears. How they are going to incorporate statistical lies into national accounts is shocking. Production location no longer matters, the thing that will count is ownership of the final product.
The year 1979 may very well have been the year when the middle-class in America had first began it's long decent into oblivion. According to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, manufacturing in the U.S. peaked in 1979 when we had over 19.6 million manufacturing jobs in a labor force of 104.6 million. In 1979 manufacturing was 21.6% of all jobs. Now manufacturing is only 9.9% of jobs in America.
We fill our lives with media. Day in and day out the screens and voices spin a tall fictional tale of Americans with good jobs, houses, cars, educational opportunities and money. Frontline brings home the real America, the one we don't want to face. Gone is the American Dream, replaced with foreclosures, food stamps and work that doesn't pay enough to even make the most modest rent. The new America is a wasteland of broken dreams, broken promises and broken people working themselves into the ground and still not even getting by.
Manufacturing was once widely recognized as the outstanding strength of America and the basis of its prosperity, but manufacturing also has a more recent history of being almost a pariah. This newer view equated computer chips with potato chips, asserted that manufacturing is better left to others, and suggested that the nation is actually fortunate to be losing manufacturing and aiming to replace it with design, research, and services.
CBS 60 Minutes profiled one town near Purgatory mountain, Asheboro, North Carolina to show what's really wrong with the U.S. economy. It's not taxes, small government or big government, or even the deficit. The real problem are jobs going offshore, companies treating workers as disposable and the never ending race to the bottom on wages, global labor arbitrage.
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