Do prez candidates care if China eats our lunch?
WASHINGTON _ A new report out today says that the ballooning trade deficit with China in recent years is responsible for the loss of 2.3 million jobs in the United States, including 45,400 in Missouri and over 100,000 in Illinois.
One surprise is that it’s not just blue-collar jobs: 31 percent of those whose job loss is attributed to China were college-educated men and women.
The report was done by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington for the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a partnership of steel companies, labor unions and others.
The report concludes that the problem is getting worse – that our $250 billion-plus trade deficit with China last year cost Americans 366,000 jobs.
It’s not just imports of clothing, toys and cheap goods: The report found that the growing number of Chinese computers and electronic equipment reaching U.S. shores was responsible for nearly half of the recent deficit.
The report was released now in hopes that trade would become a more prominent issue in the presidential campaign. Recently, the federal government – with Congress arguably complicit – has done little about trying to force China to value its currency fairly, trim manufacturing subsidies and take other steps to make trade more fair.
One widely held suspicion is that the U.S. government is reticent to act because of our heavy borrowing from China.
Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who took part in a phone conference to release the report, told reporters: “It’s come to the point, in essence, where we’re borrowing money from China to pay our troops in Iraq.”
Steelworkers president Leo Gerard said he wants to hear more from candidates of both parties about the economic threat from China.
“I’ll be very candid about it,” he began. “Although it’s a diminishing number, there are some folks in the Democratic Party who bought into the myth of these trade deals.”
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What “myth of these trade deals” is Mr. Gerard talking about. What should the U.S. government do about a capitalistic juggernaut like China? What can be done? Face it folks. In our quest for cheaper goods, we let China own us and there’s nothing that can be done about it.