Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Many people might think that the country’s problems stem from the fact that too much money has been going to the very rich. Over the last three decades, the richest one percent of the population has increased its share of national income by almost 10 percentage points (Excel spreadsheet). This comes to $1.5 trillion a year, or as the deficit hawks are fond of saying, $90 trillion over the next 75 years.

To put this in context, the size of this upward redistribution to the richest one percent over the last three decades is roughly large enough to double the income of all the households in the bottom half of the income distribution. The upward redistribution amounts to an average of more than 1.2 million dollars a year for each of the families in the richest one percent of the population.

And this upward redistribution was brought about by deliberate policy. We pursued a trade and high dollar policy that was intended to put downward pressure on the wages of manufacturing workers. The Federal Reserve Board deliberately kept unemployment higher than necessary in order to weaken workers bargaining power. We extended patent monopolies to allow drug companies to jack up prices, raking in hundreds of billions a year. And, we gave the Wall Street banks the benefit of “too big to fail” status so they can borrow with a government subsidy.

These policies and others fueled this enormous upward redistribution. But the deficit hawks don’t want us talking about any of these things. (more…)

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Little brothers exist to be abused by their older siblings. The United Kingdom has willingly played the role of abused sibling for the United States for decades.

When our president wanted to launch a hare-brained invasion of Iraq, no one was more outspoken in his support than Prime Minister Tony Blair. Who is our closest ally in our Vietnam-style occupation of Afghanistan? Yep, it’s the Brits again. And now the new Conservative-Liberal government is taking the lead in trying to use government austerity to restore prosperity.

Those of us who oppose austerity in the United States are delighted. The U.K. is jumping out front to lay off public sector workers, raise taxes, and cut government programs and supports across the board. It is doing this at a time when the economy has nearly 8 percent unemployment and considerably excess capacity in almost every sector of its economy.

This drive to austerity comes at a time when the short-term rate set by the Bank of England is 0.5 percent and the rate on 10-year bonds is just 3.0 percent. The timing is also perfectly wrong in that most of the U.K.’s major trading partners are also suffering from weak economies and therefore unlikely to provide strong export markets. Nor are they likely to tolerate a substantial devaluation of the pound against their currency. (more…)

Zach Carter

Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet; Fellow, Campaign for America’s Future

There are plenty of reasons why the foreclosure fraud crisis sweeping the nation’s housing market is an economic disaster. Banks are charging borrowers illegal fees, kicking the wrong people out of their homes and even hiring thugs to illegally break into houses. But the fundamental scam is much worse than these shameful acts. Fraud in the foreclosure process conceals a second, more massive fraud: the astonishing levels of mortgage fraud perpetrated by subprime lenders during the housing bubble. These frauds don’t just expose big banks to epic losses, they expose bigwig bankers to prison time.

Clearly, we’re dealing with a lot of different frauds here. Tomorrow, I’ll detail one of the smaller-bore problems with foreclosure fraud: providing cover for illegal fees that lenders charge to troubled borrowers. But today I’ll discuss a much different and much bigger scandal. During the housing bubble, banks falsified documents on a massive scale in order to issue as many toxic subprime loans as possible. This was straightforward mortgage fraud, and the current wave of fraud in the foreclosure process is covering it up.

In 2004, the FBI sounded the alarm about an “epidemic” in mortgage fraud. This was right at the beginning of the real subprime explosion — things got much worse as the housing bubble inflated. What’s more, according to the FBI, 80 percent of mortgage fraud is committed by lenders.

Bankers and mortgage brokers didn’t just make reckless loans to borrowers who couldn’t afford them. They also illegally falsified documentation in order to push borrowers into loans they could not afford. This was not a con perpetrated by irrational poor people attempting to live beyond their means — it was committed by perfectly rational lenders, who knew they could make a handsome profit by selling these garbage mortgages off to investors.

We know about how these frauds were incentivized at specific lenders thanks to anecdotes collected banks that actually went under during the crisis. When Washington Mutual collapsed in September 2008, it was one of the largest banks on the West Coast, with $350 billion in assets. It wasn’t a small-time specialty shop operating off the grid — it was a regulated bank, overseen by the Office of Thrift Supervision, subject to standard consumer protection regulations and federal anti-fraud statutes. Yet the bank engaged in systematic, knowing fraud which its executives allowed to continue unpunished. As Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., emphasized in a hearing this April, the company even rewarded some of its employees who committed fraud by promoting them. (more…)

Zach Carter

Zach Carter
Economics Editor, AlterNet

I’ll have plenty to say about the escalating foreclosure fraud scandal later this week. For now: This is a big, big deal. It isn’t a clerical error, it’s an aggressive attempt to slap borrowers with thousands of dollars in illegal fees for the luxury of being foreclosed on. And what’s more, this absurd, shady business was priced into the entire mortgage securitization scheme from the get-go. Banks have been fudging their documentation for years in order to cut costs and score higher profits from securitization—the business model has relied on this corner-cutting since day one of the housing boom.

The good news is that borrowers can use this epic fraud to defend themselves. If a bank can’t prove that it has the right to foreclose on a borrower by showing the proper documentation to a judge, then it doesn’t have the right to foreclose. This is a tremendous opportunity for neighborhood advocates. Make them pony up the docs, it might just save your home. The problem isn’t restricted to GMAC—foreclosure counselors and attorneys talk about the issue of forged or destroyed documentation all the time, and we already know that JPMorgan Chase and Countrywide (now Bank of America) have major documentation problems. Including GMAC, that’s three of the biggest players in every aspect of the mortgage market.

If courts actually follow the law here, we get the best of both worlds—big losses for Wall Street on their predatory loans, and borrowers who get to stay in their homes (mortgage-free, at that). The only question is whether these mortgage losses prove so severe that Wall Street banks come back begging to the government for another bailout. If so, it’s an opportunity to do what should have been done in 2008—break up these financial monsters into smaller creatures that don’t require bailouts when they fail. (more…)

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

It is amazing that angry mobs have not risen up and chased all the economists out of the country. While the greed of the Wall Street gang provided the fuel for the bubble, the economists played an essential role as enablers. This was most directly true for economists in policymaking positions, like Alan Greenspan at the Fed.

It was Greenspan’s job to stop the housing bubble. A competent and honest Fed chair would have recognized the bubble by 2002 and taken whatever steps were necessary to rein it in. And we should be 100 percent clear, in spite of all the song and dance about how the financial reform bill will prevent another bailout, the Fed absolutely had all the tools needed to stop this disaster. They just lacked either the competence or the integrity, or both.

But the economists in policymaking positions are just the beginning. There are thousands of macroeconomists across the country, in government, academia and private industry who track the economy as a full-time job. It is actually a well-paid job, with many drawing six-figure salaries and big name types getting close to $1 million a year.

Given the high pay for this profession, it was reasonable to expect that they would be able to see something like the $8 trillion housing bubble that eventually wrecked the economy when it collapsed. But you can count on your fingers the number of economists who raised warnings about the housing bubble. The rest either did not see it, or didn’t think it worth mentioning. (more…)

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker 
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Most people are familiar with the concept of “chicken hawks.” Chicken hawks are the politicians who are anxious to send other people to risk their lives in war, but somehow managed to avoid service when they had the opportunity to fight themselves. Former Vice-President Dick Cheney and former President George W. Bush are the leading members of the chicken hawk society.

It turns out that we have a similar story with budget policy, where there appears to be a large contingent of budget deficit chicken hawks. The deficit hawks have been filling the news lately. These are the folks who are yelling that something terrible will happen if we don’t reduce the deficit. Most of them seem to have missed the fact that something terrible is now happening. We have almost 15 million people unemployment and 9 million underemployed, with several million facing the loss of their home in the next few years.

People of all ages are seeing their lives wrecked by a economic disaster that was entirely preventable, if the folks running economic policy were not too incompetent to notice an $8 trillion housing bubble. In fact, one of the reasons that this bubble did not get noticed was that even before the bubble burst – creating large deficits — the deficit hawks were running around yelling about the deficits. These deficit hawks were able to get far more attention for their whining than the people who were warning about the dangers posed by the housing bubble.

Now that we have seen this collapse, rather than supporting action to get the economy back on its feet, the deficit hawks are again yelling about the long-term deficit. But, what is really striking is that many of the people who whine loudest about the deficit are the most reluctant to take steps to reduce the deficit – at least when it involves powerful interest groups. (more…)

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

It is amazing how people in Washington are so forgiving — of each other. We have close to 15 million people unemployed and more than 8 million people under-employed because the folks managing our economy were incompetent.

In spite of the efforts of economists and policy types to portray the cause of the economic collapse as being complicated, it wasn’t. It was really really simple. Prior to the downturn the economy was being driven by an $8 trillion housing bubble. This led to a boom in residential construction. (A separate bubble in commercial real estate led to a boom in non-residential construction.) The equity generated by the housing bubble also led to a surge in consumption, with the saving rate falling to almost zero at the peak of the bubble.

It was inevitable that the bubble burst. Bubbles do that. They lead to an over-supply and eventually we run out of suckers willing or able to pay bubble-inflated prices for houses. The collapse caused the economy to lose $1.2 trillion in annual demand from the private sector. Annual construction spending fell back by close to $600 billion and consumption fell by roughly the same amount as a result of the loss of housing wealth.

There is no mechanism that allows the economy to easily replace this much demand. Hence we were guaranteed a severe downturn, without massive amounts of spending by the government. (more…)

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Is advice from the IMF better than advice from a drunk in the street? That is the question that people around the world should be asking as the International Monetary Fund dishes out its prescription for austerity. The IMF program calls for cutbacks in government support for healthcare, pensions, and a wide range of other public services. It also calls for weakening labor market regulations that provide workers with job security.

These recommendations are being given in a context where the world economy is suffering from a massive shortfall of demand. In other words, tens of millions of people are unemployed right now because there is not enough spending to keep them employed. The IMF’s program is almost certain to reduce spending further leading to even larger shortfalls in demand and more unemployment.

But, the IMF says that we should trust them. The question we should all be asking is: “why?”

Where was the IMF when the housing bubble in the US and elsewhere was inflating to ever more dangerous levels? Was it frantically yelling at governments to rein in the bubbles before they burst with disastrous consequences? After all, what could possibly have been more important than warning of the dangers of these bubbles?

It was easy to both recognize the housing bubbles and that their collapse would have devastating consequences for the economy. Economies don’t adjust easily to a loss of wealth that in some cases exceeded 50 percent of GDP.

Real economists know this, but apparently the folks at the IMF did not, or if they did, they didn’t think it was worth saying anything. One will look in vain through IMF publications during the build-up of the housing bubble for serious warnings of the potential dangers. While the IMF can scream about the need for austerity today, it couldn’t be bothered to say much about the bubbles that got us here.

The IMF’s track record gives us reason not only to question the institution’s competence but also its motivations. This question comes up most clearly in the case of Argentina. At the end of 2001 Argentina defaulted on its debt, enraging the IMF. Prior to the default, Argentina had been an IMF poster child eagerly embracing the IMF’s program.

The IMF’s growth forecasts clearly reflected its change of attitude toward Argentina. Prior to the default the IMF was consistently overly optimistic about Argentina’s growth prospects, projecting much higher growth than Argentina actually experienced. After the default, the IMF was hugely over-pessimistic, projecting much lower growth rates than it subsequently experienced. It is difficult to explain this pattern of errors except by a political motivation.

It is possible to see a similar pattern in the IMF’s latest set of policy recommendations to deal with the economic crisis. The impact of most of its proposals will be to reduce the benefits received by ordinary workers. The proposed changes in labor market regulations will likely also weaken workers’ bargaining power, leading to cuts in wages. Furthermore, the reduction in demand caused by the turn to austerity will leave millions more out of work, both depriving these workers of income and further weakening the bargaining power of those who still have jobs.

There are alternatives. Central banks like the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Board could just buy and hold large amounts of government debt. These central banks can both ensure that there are no questions of solvency by providing a ready market for government debt and that there is no build-up of interest burdens. The interest paid on the debt held by the banks is refunded to governments.

Large-scale central bank purchases of government debt will not create inflation in a context of massive unemployment and excess capacity. This is not a point we have to debate. Japan’s central bank has bought an amount of government debt roughly equal to its GDP, yet it remains far more concerned about deflation than inflation. While we could hope to do better on the stimulus front than Japan, inflation is simply not a problem it faces now or even on the distant horizon.

It is especially painful to see these calls for austerity coming from the IMF. This organization is distinguished not only by its dismal track record in pushing economic policies that don’t work; it also is known for the exorbitant benefits that it gives its economists. Under the IMF’s pension program, many staffers can retire in their early 50s with six-figure pensions. Imagine the folks who completely missed the housing bubble or who got it totally wrong on Argentina lounging around the tropics at age 51 on their $100,000 a year IMF pension. When it comes to economic advice, I think I’d rather listen to that honest street drunk.

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This piece is re-posted from The Huffington Post

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Dean Baker is author of the new book, “Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy,” PoliPoint Press, LLC. This piece was first published on the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Jobs Byte. CEPR’s Jobs Byte is published each month upon release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employment report. For more information or to subscribe by fax or email contact CEPR at 202-293-5380 ext. 102 or chinku@CEPR.net.

Dean Baker

By Dean Baker
Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Next weekend will feature another milestone in the drive to cut Social Security and Medicare. The organization America Speaks will be hosting a series of 20 meetings in cities across the country. They will ask the people at these meetings, a cross section of the nation, to come up with proposals for dealing with the country’s projected long-term budget deficit.

The way the problem is outlined for these meetings virtually guarantees that most of the participants will opt for big cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The results of this song-and-dance exercise will then be presented to President Obama’s fiscal responsibility commission on June 30th, which will use it as further ammunition for plans by its co-chairs to gut these programs.

The rigged deck approach should come as no surprise. America Speaks is largely funded by Peter G. Peterson, the investment banker billionaire who has been on a decades long crusade to gut these programs. In recent years, Peterson has redoubled his efforts, committing more than a billion dollars to a wide variety of groups in addition to America Speaks. To advance his agenda Peterson has even set up a fake news service, the Fiscal Times. To fill the staff, Peterson’s son hired a number of reputable reporters who were displaced by the collapse of the newspaper industry.

Federal Budget 101, the guidebook for the discussion, follows a predictably shoddy path. The book discusses the budget in almost complete isolation from any larger discussion of the economy. There is virtually no discussion of the ways in which the budget fosters growth, for example by funding education, research and infrastructure; nor the way in which the pattern of growth affects the budget.

For example, the booklet never discusses the extent to which the economic mismanagement that allowed the unchecked growth of an $8 trillion housing bubble contributed to the debt that is its central concern. The downturn caused by the resulting economic collapse will eventually add more than $3 trillion to the country’s debt, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s projections.

The booklet also neglects to point out the extent to which the long-term budget disaster story is driven by our broken health care system. If per person health care costs in the United States were the same as in any other wealthy country, we would be looking at enormous budget surpluses in the long-term, not deficits.

Incredibly, the booklet does not even point out the fact that income is projected to grow over time. The average hourly wage is projected to buy 20 percent more in 2025 (the year for which participants are supposed to design a budget) than it does today.

This knowledge might affect how people view things like tax increases. For example, if we know that people will be on average 20 percent richer, we might be less concerned if their tax rate were to rise by 1-2 percentage points.

The booklet also never mentions the plunge in wealth that older workers have suffered as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble and plunge in the stock market. This has left the bulk of near retirees (those in their late 40s and 50s) facing retirement with almost nothing other than their Social Security and Medicare.

The booklet even gets its basic economics wrong, warning participants at the very beginning that rising deficits can lead to a weaker dollar. In the real econ 101, students learn just the opposite — that budget deficits can jack up interest rates leading to a stronger dollar. This is how a budget deficit can be tied to a trade deficit — by raising the value of the dollar. A higher dollar makes U.S. exports more expensive to foreigners and imports cheaper for people living in the United States.

People who want to see our trade deficit fall want a lower dollar. Getting the value of the dollar down (not up) is an argument that more serious people would give for a smaller budget deficit. Peterson should have been able to get a better product for his millions.

Finally, it is striking that not a single person connected with this project was among those who warned of the housing bubble before its collapse wrecked the economy. Ostensibly, America Speaks tried to include a diverse range of economists and policy analysts. Yet, in the category of people who recognized the biggest economic disaster of the last 80 years, America Speaks came up completely empty.

To put this in perspective, suppose Peter Peterson had funded this exercise back in 2004, when the housing bubble was already huge, but still at a point where it could have been deflated without devastating the economy. This group would have given us a great discussion of the 2020 deficit, but said nothing about the tsunami that was about to wreck the economy (and send the deficit skyrocketing).

Unfortunately, there is no reason to assume that the America Speaks crew’s understanding of the economy is any better today than it was in 2004. We need more serious analysis than this propaganda exercise as a basis for deciding the fate of essential programs like Social Security and Medicare.

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This blog was first published on The Huffington Post

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Dean Baker is author of the new book, “Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy,” PoliPoint Press, LLC. This piece was first published on the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Jobs Byte. CEPR’s Jobs Byte is published each month upon release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ employment report. For more information or to subscribe by fax or email contact CEPR at 202-293-5380 ext. 102 or chinku@CEPR.net.

Leo W. Gerard

Richard McCormack

Q&A

Leo W. Gerard: Richard, when you appeared recently at Youngstown State University as a guest of the Center for Working-Class Lecture Series, you talked about how essential manufacturing is to the U.S. economy and how politicians seem clueless about that. In fact, you said, “Politicians don’t get it.” When did that happen because clearly politicians in the 1950s understood that a solid economy rests on manufacturing products of real value?

Richard McCormack:  It happened imperceptibly over the past three decades, but perhaps the defining (though little observed) event was when Wal-Mart overtook General Motors as the country’s largest employer. When that happened, the retail industry became one of the most powerful political entities in the country, replacing the manufacturing industry.

The crossover from GM to Wal-Mart is important because retail started setting the terms of the debate not only with politicians, but also with manufacturers. Retailers are driven by increasing profits by pennies on the dollar by paying workers low wages with no benefits and buying cheap imports.

The loss of the manufacturing sector’s political influence also occurred with the rise of the finance sector, which became the dominant force in political gift-giving. The Wall Street financial sector does not give one-half hoot about American jobs.

The loss of America’s industrial capability also coincided with the persistent selling of economic ideology to the American public and its politicians that the country would be a lot more prosperous getting rid of crappy manufacturing jobs and creating jobs in the service and “knowledge” sectors. That grand experiment in creating a “post-industrial economy” just suffered a monumental collapse.

Americans have allowed the big corporate multinational companies and their agents to take control of their political system. It remains to this day a system that is stacked against American workers and American taxpayers. Americans have not entered the fight to save American jobs. I wonder if the middle class is drugged up on Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods; addicted to sugar, salt and fat; fake “news” shows on television; and Prozac to deal with depression and lull them into thinking that their condition is beyond control. Something is stopping Americans from getting off their couches and demanding a voice in America’s economic future. Americans have lost their country to a few people who make a lot of money off outsourcing, off-shoring and importing everything Americans used to make and continue to buy. Americans must take their country back before it is too late.

Gerard: You have written about this problem in the book, “Manufacturing A Better Future for America,” and elsewhere. How do we make politicians understand how vital manufacturing is?

 McCormack: Politicians need to be hit over their heads with a baseball bat as forcefully as is possible, with Americans insisting that they at least acknowledge that a country that doesn’t make what is consumes is going to fail. It is a simple concept. There are many historical precedents of countries and empires failingafter having lost their productive capacity. It is an ancient concept: a country that does not have industry cannot support an army. 

The United States has just gone through a period of unprecedented loss of wealth. Its citizens have taken a collective economic step down. Yet politicians are sitting smug in the belief that they can borrow more money. They work in Washington, D.C., where I live. This place is humming. Most of them have no idea what the country looks like. Have they been to Detroit, Saginaw, Youngstown – America’s heartland? America’s heartland is dead. That means its heart has stopped beating. What happens to a person when their heart stops beating?

The financial meltdown wasn’t caused by the housing bubble or the financial bubble or the dot-com bubble, although all of those things contributed. It was caused by the simple fact that American consumers have sent all of their wealth to China, Korea, Japan, Germany and Mexico buying all of the things they once made. Tell that to the politicians. They don’t get it. They don’t get it and they don’t get it, which means they have to be hit over the head and be hit over the head and be hit over the head as hard as is possible to hit them with the simple message, over and again: the country cannot survive if it sends all of its wealth offshore. The country has to produce what it consumes. Our politicians do not understand this basic FACT. Have they looked at why China is becoming a superpower? It’s not because China exports its sports heroes and pop culture. It’s because China has embraced manufacturing as THE means to economic superiority. It is the same path the United States took to reach global dominance. Inexplicably, the United States abandoned that path.

Gerard: In Youngstown, you quoted Ralph E. Gomory, the retired IBM senior vice president for Science and Technology and a winner of the Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment, as saying the interests of American corporations have diverged from the interests of America, yet politicians act as if they’re still the same. Can you explain what that means both in terms of the economy and employment?

McCormack: Ralph Gomory has made one of the most profound and important observations on the current global economic situation. He says that outsourcing is not free trade. Yet the federal government still represents the interests of the powerful companies that are firing millions of American workers and shifting those jobs offshore. 

Domestic manufacturers have told me repeatedly that the greatest protectionists in our country are the corporate and financial companies that are doing everything in their power to protect their assets in China. To influence policy in their favor, the multinationals, retailers, importers and foreign producers fund think tanks, trade associations, lobbyists, lawyers and public relations firms. These are the real protectionists, not American businessmen who want to save American jobs and the American middle class.

The U.S. government continues to craft policies that are beneficial for companies that outsource jobs. For instance, the U.S. government refuses to confront China over its currency manipulation because the companies that benefit most from China’s undervalued currency are the American companies that have shifted their production there. Who does the U.S. government represent? The tens of millions of American workers who get the ax due to China’s blatant cheating, or the few CEOs at multinational companies and the financial class who make more and more money?

It was no coincidence that the stock market had its best year ever in 2009 – the same year millions of Americans were losing their jobs. The dynamic still hasn’t changed, despite the financial sector’s meltdown: Every time a company announces American worker layoffs, its stock price goes up. Yet policymakers equate the stock market with a healthy economy. They are as wrong on that as they are on the belief that the world is flat.

Gerard:  You have also said that politicians’ decision to implement the concept of free trade – which is not fair trade – has largely contributed to the nation’s problems. Would you talk about how something as positive-sounding as free trade devastated American industry?

McCormack:  A friend of mine works at the Commerce Department. He says that free trade is a farce. The United States has tariffs of 2 percent or 3 percent on incoming products. Yet the United States trades with countries with tariffs that are 10 times higher. Is that free trade? He has a simple solution to the U.S. trade crisis: hold up a mirror to any nation trading with the United States. Whatever their tariffs are on U.S. products entering their country, that is what the U.S. tariff should be on their products entering America. 

How can U.S. producers compete when they must pay for all of the costs that foreign producers don’t have to add to the price of their product? These costs include things like scrubbers and baghouses on coal plants. Not requiring the generation of clean power is a Chinese subsidy offered to all manufacturers setting up shop in China. It is an unfair subsidy that U.S. companies cannot counter without the U.S. government saying that it is unfair. Even worse, 75 percent of the mercury pollution in the United States can be attributed to Asian coal-fired plants that do not have emissions controls. The majority of these plants are located in China. China is poisoning America. If it was happening in the United States, the federal government would take the American utility or industrial company to court and impose fines of millions of dollars. What does the U.S. government do about China’s toxic emissions drifting over U.S. airspace? Nothing.

U.S. manufacturers have to abide by a thousand EPA rules and OSHA standards. Not so in China. That is a huge advantage. The United States government lets American companies that have set up shop in China get away with not having to abide by American standards – even though their products are being sold in the United States.

It is morally wrong.

Any foreign product sold in the United States should be required to be produced under the same conditions as is required for producers of the same product in the United States. If these requirements are not going to be enforced on overseas competitors, as they are here so vigorously by our federal government, then those cost advantages should be calculated and tacked onto the price of the product entering the United States.

Foreign producers should NOT have this unfair advantage. It is an outrage that the United States has allowed this to occur.

It is time for the country to stop listening to importers, their agents in Washington, including foreign governments, retailers and the financial industry. The U.S. government has to start representing the interest of American manufacturers, workers and business owners. It does not now. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is reality.

Gerard: In the chapter you wrote for the book, “Manufacturing A Better Future for America,” you said something that every American should find frightening. You said that when Congress cuts the taxes of individuals or gives them tax rebates in an attempt to stimulate the economy, the actual effect is to create jobs in foreign countries. Can you explain that?

McCormack: The U.S. government has just spent the past 10 years trying DESPERATELY to stimulate the U.S. economy, with trillion-dollar tax cuts, tax giveaways, low interest rates and even two wars that have lasted for nine years. Then the Democrats took office in 2009 and enacted their own $787 billion “stimulus.” Every time Americans have had a few extra bucks in their pocket (from tax cuts to direct government payments to home equity loans) they have spent that money on products that are now made somewhere else in the world. Is it any wonder why China’s economy was growing by 10 percent per year during the past 10 years, as U.S. consumers shipped more and more of their hard-earned dollars there to buy everything? 

Gerard: You have been critical of the second economic stimulus bill – called a jobs bill – that Congress is now talking about. You contend that the proposed bill won’t create new jobs. Here’s what you actually said, “I don’t see any jobs there. I just see more money being spent.” What’s wrong with that bill?

McCormack:  It is more of the same. Only a very small percentage of the bill encourages investment in U.S. production. There is not a single program aimed at countering the incentives that foreign countries are providing their companies and U.S. producers to set up operations in their country. The United States has to start competing – to start countering those incentives with its own incentives to manufacturing companies. It doesn’t matter if these companies are American companies or foreign companies. To create lasting, decent jobs, the United States needs global companies to open production in the United States to serve the U.S. market.

Small American companies do not need a $30-billion tax cut to hire workers. They need CUSTOMERS. They won’t hire a soul unless they have a customer to sell them a product. Yet the country continues to lose manufacturing plants to China.

Gerard: If you could actually get Congress to listen to you, what would you tell them is necessary to create good new jobs?

McCormick: Ask the 50 economic development officers from each of the states to form a U.S. Economic Development Council. These people and their offices know what is being planned in terms of company expansions. Give them a war chest, some of the TARP money or funding from the proposed “jobs” bill, and tell them to deploy the same tactics they use in their states to attract industry to America. All of the states are competing against each other to attract industrial investment. They should be working together, especially since supply chains cross state borders.

Gerard: When I go to Washington, what I hear is that we don’t need manufacturing. That’s old and dirty. So many politicians say the U.S. can move to a financial and service economy. You disagree with that. Why?

McCormick: I hear it too, though a little less often, thank goodness.  This argument is what has led to the demise of the United States. People are just starting to realize that as manufacturing goes offshore, high-end jobs in design and research and development go with it. When a plant closes, the supply chain disappears. This supply chain includes materials and parts producers, software providers, like CAD (computer-aided design), ERP (enterprise resource planning) and dozens of other high-tech equipment providers, machine tool companies, maintenance, accounting, packaging – the list goes on to include such things as the local restaurants, janitorial services and those dependent on the plant’s tax revenues, like librarians, county clerks, police officers and teachers. These are service jobs, all of which depend on manufacturing. One manufacturing job supports 15 other jobs. No other category of job has such a high multiplier. The United State must do whatever it can to start creating manufacturing jobs.

Gerard: We are losing at the international trade game with imports far exceeding exports and creating a massive trade deficit. Is it over for the U.S., or can Washington actually do something to reverse this situation?

McCormick: The game is not over. Not yet. But the country is perilously close to a period of sustained pain caused by continuing huge trade and budget deficits. The United States is assuming greater and greater debt. The country cannot borrow its way to prosperity. At some point very soon, the United States has to stop accumulating debt and start the process of paying it down. The only way to do this is by producing the products Americans consume – like cellphones, televisions, digital cameras, computers, semiconductors, printed circuit boards, autos, steel, household items, appliances, luggage, clothes – everything – and to start producing a new generation of radical and revolutionary products that the rest of the world needs to buy.

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Richard McCormack is editor and publisher of Manufacturing & Technology News, a publication he created in 1994. It is read by industry executives, government officials and academics on five continents. McCormack has reported on science and technology, industry and government in Washington, D.C. for 26 years specializing in economic competitiveness and globalization. He has won numerous journalism awards for investigative, analytical and interpretative reporting. He is author of the book, “Lean Machines: Learning from the Leaders of the Next Industrial Revolution.” And he is the editor of the new book, “Manufacturing A Better Future for America,” for which he wrote the first chapter, “The Plight of American Manufacturing.”