Quote from mgookin:
Re the global warming issue, I was in graduate school 4 years ago when our historical geology professor stated that the earth goes through warming and cooling cycles and nobody can figure out why we are so COOL at this point in time as we are supposed to currently be much warmer then we are. This past winter was one of the coolest in decades. Call it global cooling/ global warming/ whatever you want. This rock has been here 4.5B years. What we have done in the past 100 years is moot.
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would have lost if BSC crashed and burned?
As far as people in industrialized towns loosing homes, that's been going on as long as the USAID program has been shipping jobs offshore and shutting down American factories. It's nothing new in this present depression. The Bush's have been the biggest proponents of using your tax dollars to put your fellow countrymen out of work in the interest of big business.
This IBD article expresses, better than I have been able to do in this thread, how free trade and exports have saved us. It also talks about how we are now actually manufacturing more than we are losing with our free trading partners! And it also explains how exports with free trade partners has raised the average income of all Americans significantly.
This link also says the same thing that I have been: exports have been just about the only engine of growth and recovery for the drunken Greenspan orgies of our economy. Again, anti-globalization will kill what little growth we have been experiencing!
http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=302138403720589
With all the jeremiads about the trade deficit and the millions of supposed "lost jobs" due to imports, you wouldn't know that the reverse actually is true: Soaring U.S. exports are helping keep America's economy afloat, and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs here in the U.S.
Sure, a weak dollar helps. So does a renewed interest by companies and their workers in pursuing business overseas. But most of the credit should go to all the free-trade deals the U.S. has signed â which are now proving their worth.
Exports have been rising at a remarkable 11.1% annual pace since 2000 (see chart), nearly doubling average nominal GDP growth of 5.8%. It's no exaggeration to say trade has become a key underpinning of our economy's growth.
Recently, the National Association of Manufacturers noted that we now sell more manufactured goods than we buy from all those countries we have free-trade agreements with. The first-quarter surplus with our free-trade partners was a half-billion dollars â compared with a deficit of $176 billion with the rest of the world.
In short, free trade has become a major boon to American makers of everything from jetliners and earth-moving equipment to movies and financial services.
As we said, trade looks increasingly like a life preserver for the U.S. economy. In the second quarter, estimates for GDP growth range from as low as just below 1% to as high as 3%. Different as they are, most estimates agree on one thing: Trade will push growth in the second quarter,
making up as much as two-thirds of GDP's rise.
This belies the notion that has become common of late: that trade is somehow a drag on the economy. Certainly right now it isn't. Nor is it in the long run, as recent studies show.
Since World War II, trade has been our silent partner in growth. Free-trade deals signed by the U.S. have added millions of high-paying jobs to our economy and moderated the length and frequency of our recessions. Thanks to free-trade, the average household since WWII has seen its income rise by $10,000, studies show.
And getting rid of remaining trade barriers would lift household incomes as much as $12,000 more, according to economists Gary Hufbauer and Matthew Adler of the Peterson Institute.
Nor is the U.S. alone in reaping benefits from freer trade. The World Bank says reducing trade barriers, subsidies and tariffs would boost the developing world's income by $350 billion by 2015.
In short, nothing is so falsely maligned in economics as free trade. It's made all of us wealthier and more secure. Remember this as we enter a new election cycle, and charlatans on both the left and right use free trade as a scapegoat for our current economic ills.
