Wake up call
When I woke up this morning, grabbed a cup of coffee to steady myself, and flipped on the computer, what should greet me as the first news item but: “Tech Firms Defend Moving Jobs Overseas.”
This thing is heating up as a political issue and the everybody is getting their licks in. Companies wanting to fend-off protectionist moves are saying legislation about trade is not the solution.
The companies said such policies would do little to resolve long-standing problems more broadly affecting America’s global competitiveness, such as low-scoring schools and inadequate research spending. Erecting barriers, they said, “could lead to retaliation from our trading partners and even an all-out trade war.”
Personally I think this view is pretty correct. But there’s more.
Job export discussion
Last evening while cooking dinner I surfed TV channels and came across a C-SPAN press conference at the Brookings Institute about an editorial piece published in the Intl. Herald Tribune on 1/7 by NY Senator Charles Schumer and Charles Roberts, a former Treasury undersecretary in the Regan administration. As my chops sizzled they discussed the piece titled “Exporting jobs is not free trade.” Also in the discussion was another Brookings economist and Thomas Donahue, the CEO of the US Chamber of Commerce. I say this to establish that, while Schumer is a Democrat, this wasn’t exactly a nest of anti-Capitalist activists.
I’m not going to go over the issues because I’ve posted a lot of stuff related to it and commented on it before. In fact, here’s a link to the op-ed piece and the entire broadcast is at c-span.com under “Brookings Discussion of US Trade Policy.” A summary of the discussion is also at Brookings. It’s good to see good, broad thinking about this. Nobody framed it as an issue of Silicon Valley IT-types who are having a tough time getting a job. They all agreed there is a fundamental change in economic conditions and dynamics taking place. There were a few interesting points:
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