Balanced Trade Key to Restoring U.S. Full Employment

From the DC underground:

None of these proposals from the right or left clearly address the problem we have with creating good jobs here and the associated deficit. All the good jobs mainly in manufacturing and associated R&D are gone and, perhaps for good, thanks to a bipartisan effort on globalization and free trade over the last 10-15 years. No one, right or left, has even identified this as the problem or proposed solutions to the mess that has been created by our large corporations and Wall St Banks as they off-shored jobs to China and elsewhere.

Yes, we should have trade as we have with Germany and Europe that buys and sells with the USA. But not the one- way trade we have with China that only buys farm and raw materials from the USA like the old colony days as China seeks to become number one globally. American companies like GM are under the delusion that they have to get their foot in the door in China with joint venture partnerships with Chinese companies where the U.S. company hold only a small 33 percent minority partnership that is used to gain access to American technology and manufacturing before kicking out the American partner. How much of those GM cars are made with U.S content? In these days of automation what would it cost to U.S. consumers to buy American? Not much I suspect.

Instead we have the Heritage Foundation and Paul Ryan proposing the usual, long held voodoo economics solutions of lower taxes (now even the flat tax) for the wealthy and large corporations, deregulation, free trade, all of this to reduce the deficit on the backs of the middle class. Almost all of this voodoo economics, as Reagan’s chief economist called it, has been tried and doesn’t work. The flat tax and Medicare and Social Security privatization are just new wrinkles in their efforts to restore a new gilded age for America’s oligarchs.