Tag Archive for ‘Outsourcing’

Trump and Trade

This morning brought the surprising news that, according to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Donald Trump is running second among GOP presidential hopefuls, at 17%, behind Mitt Romney’s 21%.

I am far from a fan of the obnoxious, egomaniacal Trump, but his rise in the polls could be good news: The issue Trump has been pushing most assiduously is the damage our trade policies are causing America, especially our enormous trade deficit with China. If Trump causes other GOP candidates to begin addressing the trade issue, breaking the hold that free trade orthodoxy has on the upper reaches of the GOP, he will have performed a far greater service to our country than anyone could reasonably have predicted. Ordinary Americans overwhelmingly recognize the great damage free trade has caused our economy. It is about time that an enterprising politician decided to catch up with them.

The Dread Specter of Economic Nationalism

As Greg Kaza recently noted here, the decline in American manufacturing is a serious problem, one that accelerated under Bush and is continuing unabated under Obama. You would never know that from reading Jonah Goldberg, who wrote this morning that inveighing against corporations moving headquarters or jobs overseas is a leftist phenomenon with historical roots in the programs of Wilson, FDR, Kennedy, and Johnson. Unmentioned by Goldberg is the opposition of each of those presidents to the historic GOP program of high tariffs to protect American manufacturing. Also unmentioned by Goldberg is the possibility that Americans might be concerned about the outsourcing of American jobs as a result of the facts so ably highlighted by Kaza, not as a result of brainwashing by “progressives.” Any politician wishing to lead America out of our current morass must be able to address those facts, a task beyond both the Obamaites and their current opponents in the GOP.