“Free trade results in giving our money, our manufactures, and our markets to other nations,” warned the Republican Senator from Ohio and future President William McKinley in 1892. “Thank God I am not a free-trader,” echoed the rising Empire State Republican and future President Theodore Roosevelt.
Those were the voices of a Republican Party that believed in prospering America first.
For a quarter century, however, the party of the Bushes has been a globalist, New World Order party, and fanatically free trade.
It signed on to NAFTA, GATT, the World Trade Organization, most-favored- nation status for China, CAFTA, and KORUS, the U.S.-Korean trade treaty negotiated by Barack Obama.
So supportive have Republicans been of anything sold as free trade they have agreed to “fast track,” the voluntary surrender by Congress of its constitutional power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”
With fast track, Congress gives up its right to amend trade treaties, and agrees to restrict itself to a yea or nay vote.
And who is leading the fight to have Congress again surrender its power over trade? The GOP vice presidential nominee, and current chairman of ways and means, Paul Ryan.
Yet when one looks back on the devastation wrought by free trade, how can a party that purports to put America first sign on to fast track yet again?
In the first decade of this century, the United States lost 5 to 6 million manufacturing jobs. We lost 55,000 factories, a devastation of industry not unlike what we inflicted on Germany and Japan in 1944-45.
The trade figures are in for 2014. What do they show?
The United States ran a trade deficit of $505 billion. But as the Economic Policy Institute’s Robert Scott points out, in manufactured goods, the U.S. trade deficit rose to $524 billion, a surge of $77 billion over 2013.
The U.S. trade deficit with China soared to $342 billion. Our exports to China amounted to $125 billion. But our imports from China were almost four times as great, $467 billion.
Since Jan. 1, 2000, U.S. trade deficits with China have totaled an astronomical $3.3 trillion.
How do Clinton, Bush II and Obama defend these trade deficits that have done to our country exactly what McKinley warned they would do in 1892—given away “our money, our manufactures, and our markets” to Communist China?
Have the Chinese reciprocated for this historic transfer of America’s productive capacity and wealth by becoming a better friend and partner?
While the United States ran a $505 billion trade deficit overall, in goods we ran a trade deficit of $737 billion, or 4 percent of GDP.
And while our trade deficit in goods with China was $343 billion, with the European Union it was $141 billion, with Japan $67 billion, with Mexico $54 billion, with Canada $34 billion, with South Korea $25 billion.
Our Mexican neighbors send us illegal migrants to compete for U.S. jobs. And our multinationals send to Mexico the factories and jobs of Middle America, to exploit the low-wage labor there. One can, after all, assemble Fords more cheaply in Hermosillo than Ohio.
Of particular interest is Korea, with which the United States signed a free- trade agreement in 2011. Since then, U.S. exports to Korea have fallen, U.S. imports have risen 80 percent, and we ran a $25 billion trade deficit in 2014.
With the KORUS deal the template for the new Trans-Pacific Partnership, how can Republicans vote to throw away their right to alter or amend any TPP that Obama brings home?
Was the national vote to give Republicans majorities in Congress unseen since 1946 a vote to have the GOP turn over all power to write trade treaties to Obama and his negotiators who produced the greatest trade deficits in American history?
Do these record deficits justify such blind confidence in Obama? Do they justify Congress’ renunciation of rights over commerce that the Founding Fathers explicitly set aside for the legislative branch in Article I of the Constitution?
“If we don’t like the way the global economy works,” says Paul Ryan, “then we have to get out there and change it.”
No, we don’t. The great and justified complaint against China and Japan, who have run the largest trade surpluses at our expense, is that they are “currency manipulators.”
Correct. But the way to deal with currency manipulators is to rob them of the benefits of their undervalued currencies by slapping tariffs on goods they send to the United States.
And if the WTO says you can’t do that, give the WTO the answer Theodore Roosevelt would have given them.
Instead of wringing our hands over income inequality and wage stagnation, why don’t we turn these trade deficits into trade surpluses, as did the generations of Lincoln and McKinley, and T. R. and Cal Coolidge?
