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Saturday, February 26, 2011

America's hollowed-out, plundered and squandered manufacturing base: who did it and why, and how can it be restored?


From:
Manufacturing’s Dismal Decade

(The American Conservative) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan --

Last year, Barack Obama committed his administration to doubling U.S. exports in half a decade.

The good news: He is on the way. U.S. exports of goods and services grew in 2010 by 16.6 percent.

Bad news: U.S. imports, starting from a higher base, surged by 19.7 percent.

Result: The U.S. trade deficit in 2010 worsened by 33 percent, rising from $375 billion to $498 billion, the largest percentage increase in a decade. If Obama keeps this up, he may prove as big a disaster for U.S. manufacturing as his predecessor, although these are big shoes to fill.

As he has each February for years, Charles W. McMillion of MBG Information Services has compiled the stats on the industrial decline of his country under our free trade presidents. Here are but a few numbers for the decade from December 2000, the month before George W. Bush took the oath, to December 2010, the end of Obama’s second year.

In that decade, America ran a total of $6.1 trillion in trade deficits, more than our entire economic growth. To finance those 10 years of deficits, America had to borrow $1.553 billion every day.

And we wonder why China owns America.

In 2010, our trade deficit in manufactures alone rose 27 percent to $416 billion, far exceeding our trade deficit in crude oil. A decade of such deficits in manufactures has devastated the industrial states.
From December 2000 to December 2010, 22 states lost a third or more of their manufacturing jobs. Massachusetts, New York and Ohio lost 38 percent of their manufacturing jobs, New Jersey 39 percent, North Carolina 42 percent, Rhode Island 44 percent, Michigan 48 percent.

Political result: Free trader John McCain lost all seven, including the formerly “red” states of Ohio and North Carolina.

Trade in autos, trucks and parts, an industry in which America was dominant in the lifetime of many of us, tells the story.

Last year, the United States ran a trade deficit in autos, trucks and parts of $110 billion. The deficits with Germany, Japan, South Korea and Mexico account for that entire total...

Does it matter that manufacturing in America now accounts for one-tenth of our economy and one-tenth of our labor force, figures unseen since before the Civil War?

If you read the history of Britain in the industrial age, of America from 1865-1945 and of Bismarck’s Germany, you will think it does. If you listen to the scores of thousands of economists, none of whom ever built a great nation, you may think it does not matter who produces what where.

Is it possible America could become again the dominant manufacturing nation she was from 1880 to 1980? Not only possible but easy to accomplish — and within a decade.

Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, has half the answer. “We should offer tax credits or a five- to 10-year tax holiday to companies, domestic or foreign, that want to set up or expand a factory in the U.S.”

How would we finance it? As most foreign nations impose value-added taxes averaging 20 percent on U.S.-made goods that enter their countries, put a tariff of 20 percent on all foreign goods.

Hundreds of billions would suddenly pour into the U.S. treasury. Imports would slowly shrink. Production in America would soar.

That’s how Hamilton, Madison, Clay, Lincoln, McKinley and T.R. did it, before America forgot how she became great...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

The elitist, internationalist ideology of Globalism is behind the dismantling of America’s industrial and manufacturing base.

Globalism has succeeded in the economic overthrow of the country so fabulously because it is a synthesis of both extreme Capitalist and Marxist ideology, and hence successfully appealed to elements of both Left and Right.

The Left regards open borders, liberal international progressivism, and the general imposition of atheist-materialism all to be humanitarian imperatives.

The Capitalist Right regards international finance and corporatism, open borders for low labor wages, the war-profiteering complex and international wars necessary to sustain it, and imposed dollar hegemony to be economic imperatives. There also exists a strong component of atheist-materialism on the Capitalist Right as well.

Thus, the two have synthesized into the Globalist ideology, which is built upon greed, blood, humanitarian fraud, and stubborn, utopian ideological fanaticism.

We need to return to America-first, secured and defended borders and markets, free enterprise nationalism that charges for access to America’s mature markets, rewards companies that create American jobs, and punishes companies that shift U.S. jobs overseas.

The expression “You can’t serve two gods” applies equally to elites who want to see themselves simultaneously as patriotic Americans and aristocratic, internationalist “citizens of the world.”

Like the haughty English imperialist elites who imploded their Empire by spreading their country too thin and viewing themselves as superior aristocrats capable of governing the world, arrogant, modern American Left-Right internationalists and Globalist elites feel they are entitled to rip off the country, enrich themselves and squander America’s resources and good credit built up by generations of responsible Americans, all under the guise of a fraudulent humanitarianism.

We don’t need these pompous ass elites. Let’s cut them and their self-serving, pretentious internationalist Globalism loose before they plunder and squander until the country implodes as did both the British Empire and Soviet Union, a combination of which the U.S. government has become.

3 comments:

Dissident said...

Once again Chris, another brilliant analysis of the paradigm. I especially liked the term "pompous ass elites", that's putting it mildly isn't it?

Chris Moore said...

LOL, yeah, something along the lines of:
"!@#$&#@?!@$!-elites" would have been more accurate.

Marycatherine Barton said...

So agree.