Importing Everything But Jobs. The latest statistics on the U.S. balance of payments with the rest of the world show the United States running an ever more astronomical and dangerous trade deficit. In an article headed "Trade Deficit Hits 2nd Highest Level Ever", the Associated Press reported yesterday:

For all of last year, the U.S. trade gap surged by 24.3 percent to $617.1 billion, setting a record for the third straight year. Analysts believe that 2005 will also set a record, reflecting higher prices for imported oil and continued heavy demand by U.S. consumers for all things foreign.

Oh, that's fair. Blame consumers. We're the ones who make the purchasing decisions for Wal-Mart, are we? No, we're the ones who look at national-origin labels, desperately searching for "Made in USA", but can't find it on any of the competing products. Not any. You look for a laser-level and compare brands, all of them ostensibly American, looking for one made in the USA. You can't find it. Whose fault is that? The consumer's?!? No way.
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We're not the traitors who are gladly rushing to subvert our future and send money to our enemies. The treason — and no lesser word fits — is very high up in the corporate hierarchy, in the boardroom and executive suite of major corporations so eager to make profits for the rich who own the stock that they will sell out their country, ravage American manufacturing, and devastate the lives of countless American workers for a few extra cents per item.
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Consumers go to the store and search for "Made in USA", but can't find it. We are given one choice: buy foreign or don't buy at all. We can choose between one tool or gadget made in (Communist) China and another also made in (Communist) China. Or perhaps we can choose between an item from Communist China and another from Taiwan, Republic of China. Or Thailand or India or Japan or France or Canada. But in many areas of consumer goods, we can't find a single thing made here. Not one damned thing.
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Even food is now being imported more than exported!

The country exported $4.74 billion in various food products in January. However, imports of food products totaled $5.55 billion, giving the country a deficit of $81 million in food, a category it used to dominate in world trade.

And to whom are we getting in debt over our heads?

As usual, the largest deficit with a single country was recorded with [Communist] China, an imbalance of $15.3 billion, the third biggest imbalance on record and up 7 percent from December. The January deficit with China was driven by a 33.6 percent surge in shipments of textiles, which rose to $1.05 billion, reflecting the elimination of global quotas.

To put this into perspective, the present U.S. trade deficit with China is on the order of $183 billion a year, which is, the International Herald Tribune reported one week ago, 6 times China's military budget:

China intended to increase officially declared spending on its military by 12.6 percent this year, to $29.9 billion.

This latest official increase, combined with the Chinese Parliament's plans to enshrine in law China's threats against Taiwan's moves toward full independence, may intensify disquiet in the Bush administration and among China's neighbors about the speed and goals of China's military modernization. * * *

... some Western experts estimate that the real size of China's military spending is several times the official number, placing it third behind the United States and Russia, and there is no doubt China has embarked on an ambitious effort to develop or buy advanced aircraft, naval vessels and missiles.

In recent months, senior officials in the Bush administration have said that China's growing military reach is a potential challenge to the United States' dominance in Asia. The new director of the CIA, Porter Goss, said * * * "Beijing's military modernization and military buildup is tilting the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait". * * *

The Bush administration has criticized Taiwan for reducing military spending and has also tried to stop Europe from overturning a ban on sales of military technology to China.

While this latest increase is unlikely to draw direct criticism from the majority of Chinese citizens, it comes amid growing calls from society and members of Parliament for the government to spend more on schools, aid for the poor and rural development. * * *

So the pretense that liberalized trade will benefit the people of the Third World is shown again to be a sham. Continuing the International Herald Tribune story:

This latest rise comes after increases of 11.6 percent in 2004, 9.6 percent in 2003, 17.6 percent in 2002 and regular double-digit increases in the decade before that. But Jiang said that, for its size, China remains a meager military spender. "Compared with other great powers, China's military spending is fairly low," he said.

Indeed, China's official military budget is dwarfed by the United States' military budget of $400 billion for 2005, and it is less than half the size of Japan's military budget.

Hey! China's standard of living is a tiny fraction of ours or Japan's! The technology publisher CNET reports that wage rates for Chinese electronics engineers are 1/10 those of American engineers, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas says that manufacturing wage rates are 1/26 ours! To get comparability, then, we have to multiply the Chinese military budget by at least 18. That equates with $540 billion expended by the United States, that is, a military budget 35% greater than ours!
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U.S. transfers of wealth to Communist China are being used to fund a huge military buildup by a country that wants to throw the U.S. out of Asia and challenge us for world superpowerdom. Some Chinese even anticipate an all-out war against the United States. The arch-conservative website NewsMax contains a UPI story from March 2000 that says:

China's People's Liberation Army has outlined plans, including a nuclear conflict with the United States, to "liberate" Taiwan, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper reported Monday. * * * including plans to send 200,000 fishing vessels with a two-million-strong invading force to take over Taiwan. It also included photographs of what it said were the most advanced secret weapons in the world. These included laser weapons to disable the U.S.-owned F-17's guidance systems, the newspaper said.

The PLA has reportedly been working on a new generation of nuclear weapons, the publication said, and it outlined steps by which China would threaten the United States with nuclear war. China would then sway U.S. public opinion by making economic concessions, and it would increase arms purchases from Russia, the Post reported.

It would then stage a limited attack on Taiwan and if that failed, China would mobilize its people into exercises that would show that it is preparing to survive a nuclear war, the newspaper said.

"The United States will not sacrifice 200 million Americans for 20  million Taiwanese and eventually they are going to back down," the [Chinese Communist army] publication said.

And if we don't back down but call their 'bluff'?
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We are paying the entire cost of China's military buildup against us for an ultimate confrontation that could produce full-scale nuclear war.
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Shorter term:

The struggling U.S. textile industry fears that the lifting of these restraints will result in the loss of thousands more U.S. jobs and result in China dominating the global textile trade. U.S. manufacturers are asking [more like piteously begging] the administration for increased protection against a surge in Chinese imports.

Good luck with that! The Bush Administration won't do one damn thing to limit free trade, with anyone. China could announce a deliberate intent to destroy the U.S. textile industry completely and Bush wouldn't lift a finger. Instead, he would say that these are jobs Americans don't want, and our people should be training for better jobs, technology jobs, computers and such — except of course that those jobs are being exported to India, Ireland, and Malaysia!

After China, the United States recorded a record $6.15 billion deficit with Canada, the country's biggest trading partner, and a $6.21 billion deficit with Japan. The deficit with the 25-nation European Union was $8.1 billion, down from a December deficit of $10.3 billion.

In short, name a major trading partner of the United States, and we have a deficit with it. We can't even compete with Canada, Japan, and Europe, other high-wage areas, even with a depressed dollar!

The soaring trade deficit must be financed by foreigners willing to hold U.S. dollars in exchange for the products they sell to the United States. The concern has been that the trade deficit at some point could rise so far that foreigners become reluctant to hold dollar-denominated assets such as stocks and bonds.

Such a development could send stock prices plunging and U.S. interest rates soaring.

What, pray, would that do to all those private investment accounts Bush wants Americans (who still have jobs) to sink their retirement funds into?
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Who will be in office when all this s**t hits the fan? The Republicans are setting us up for catastrophe. Will they field a weak candidate the year before they see it all coming together to produce a great depression, and let the Demmies take the hit? Maybe. The Democrats are playing politics with bankruptcy and Iraq, hoping that things get so bad in the next few years that the Republicans won't stand a chance in 2008. And meanwhile, everything gets worse and worse for everyone but the rich.
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The poor and downwardly mobile middle class will have one growth industry of last resort: the military. They can find work in Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe Iran, maybe Syria, maybe North Korea, maybe half a dozen other countries as the neocons expand our empire of 'democracy'.
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Of course, those jobs won't pay very well, they may kill the people who take them, and when the survivors come back they will find that the Government that sent them into harm's way won't pay for long-term care of their injuries nor find them work or housing. But that's the brave new world the Republicans want: a certain proportion of Americans are, to Republicans, surplus population, uneducable and unemployable. All they're good for is cannon fodder. They can at best fite for the interests of the rich and Zionists, and die off. Republicans would rather the poor just go away and die.
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May I suggest that if we are to fite anyone, it should be the rich, here and now. We have no reason to attack people thousands of miles away when our most powerful enemies are right here at home.

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Taxing Toilet Paper. A Florida lawmaker has proposed a 2-cents-per-roll tax on toilet paper to cover costs of sewage treatment in a state whose population is bounding ever higher. Appallingly, the legislator proposing this regressive tax is a Democrat!
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A regressive tax is a regressive tax, and the poor will be hit much harder than the rich by any regressive tax. Who has more people per household who need to use toilet paper? The poor, by far. Who has less money to pay for anything, toilet paper included? The poor, of course. Two cents a roll may not seem like much to most people, but if you have only $2 left before payday, or have to borrow two bucks just to get to work to pick up your check, any increase in unavoidable expenses is a hardship. And when something is an imposition upon the poor but not the middle class or rich, we are talking about regressivity in its starkest form.
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Will toilet-paper manufacturers and retailers lower their prices to accommodate the tax increase? or raise the price under cloak of a tax increase, just as ice-cream manufacturers and soft-drink bottlers have raised the unit price by stealth, in reducing the size of containers?
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For once, Republicans may veto a regressive tax, if only because the idea comes from a Democrat. Jeb Bush, the President's brother who serves as Florida's governor (and may have presidential aspirations of his own), is quoted as worrying, "if toilet paper is taxed, people might use less of it. 'That's not necessarily a good thing,' noted the governor." Ya think?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,514.)

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:36 PM