Authors Jim Steele, left, and Don Barlett talk about solutions to the nation's economic problems.
Sunday, August 19th, 2012
Alan: The Wall Street Journal's blanket belittlement of this book includes the following passage lauding American capitalism when, in fact, the jobs lost to automation, robotization and software enhancement are fundamental to America's "jobless prosperity." Now that productivity requires a mere "turn of the automated crank," profits flow "automatically" into the pockets of those who own "the cranks." While the 1% celebrates this triumph of automation, "productivity without shared product" informs the undoing of America. Not surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal considers "productivity without shared product" the very Crown of Capitalist Creation. "According to University of Michigan economist Mark Perry, the U.S. has indeed lost more than seven million manufacturing jobs since the late 1970s, but that loss has been mainly due to productivity gains that make American products more competitive in world markets. The U.S. remains a manufacturing giant, the most productive nation in the world." In a world where half of humanity is endowed with double digit IQ, the working class has been made redundant. This will not end well.
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This is the fourth installment of excerpts from "The Betrayal of the American Dream," a new book by Donald Barlett and James Steele. The excerpts are being co-published by the Investigative Reporting Workshop and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Here, in answers to questions posed by The Inquirer, the authors outline their ideas for how the United States can solve its economic problems, the focus of the final chapter of their book. The Inquirer will host a live chat at 1 p.m. Monday, Aug. 20, with the authors.
What would you say is the No. 1 policy change that would stop the drain of American jobs?
A key goal should be to stop the bleeding of jobs in manufacturing. There has been a lot of talk in recent months about bringing manufacturing back from overseas, and a few companies have done so. It would be a defining moment in rebuilding the middle class if a significant reversal could occur, but that seems unlikely. However, we must focus on bolstering and preserving the manufacturing sector that’s left so it can survive.
For years American manufacturing has suffered at the hands of economists from leading business schools that have downplayed its importance in the economy. This needs to change. The head of a Silicon Valley technology firm, Henry Nothhaft, argues that domestic manufacturing is essential not only because of the jobs and security it provides to workers, but also because it is crucial to innovation.
“R&D decoupled from manufacturing eventually results in the loss of incremental innovation, which occurs on the factory floor,” Nothhaft has written. Because of corporate America’s obsession with downsizing and short-term profits, he says, “we have gutted our ability to build the most advanced high-tech products of tomorrow.” Factory jobs produce a ripple effect, creating many times more jobs. Similarly, Nothhaft says, “for every manufacturing job lost, ripple effects of job destruction and income erosion spread like a plague throughout the economy.”
The loss of manufacturing
Manufacturing, once a path to the middle class for American families, made up only 9 percent of the workforce in 2011, an all-time low.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Research by Monica Arpino, Michael Lawson; Graphic by Alissa Scheller, Investigative Reporting Workshop
Research by Monica Arpino, Michael Lawson; Graphic by Alissa Scheller, Investigative Reporting Workshop
Boosters of America’s evolving economy point to companies like Google and Apple as classic examples of American ingenuity and entrepreneurship. But not every company can be or should be an Apple, says Ralph Gomory, the one-time head of research at IBM. “To prosper, a country needs to make a range of good products and services, and then keep after them year after year, constantly learning, and improving their capabilities to stay with or ahead of the competition,” Gomory told a congressional committee in 2008. “Many products and services of this sort are dismissed as ‘old hat’ or even as ‘commodities,’ but many things we consume are of this type.”
As for the types of jobs replacing factory work, the future doesn’t look promising. Unlike manufactured goods, the U.S. exports more in services than it imports. A plus, right? Hardly. One of our leading service exports is in the category of travel, the services we provide to foreign tourists who visit the United States. Any job created is good, of course, but many in this category — bellmen, desk clerks, maids, garage attendants and other workers in the hospitality industry — cannot replace well-paid manufacturing jobs. In the meantime, high-value service jobs from abroad will put more and more wage pressure on those occupations at home.
To change this, we first must acknowledge that the trade policies we have followed for half a century have failed. Under them, dozens of U.S. industries have been gutted by imports, and new industries that could offset some of the job losses in our older industries haven’t been given the support they need to export their products to foreign markets.
The most obvious solution to the decline in manufacturing is to enforce existing trade laws by taking action against governments that unfairly subsidize their own industries and undermine the jobs of U.S. workers. In some cases the solution would require imposing tariffs — perhaps even high tariffs. The very mention of tariffs infuriates free traders. But unless we are willing to enforce the law, other countries will continue to ignore U.S. pleas to open their markets.
Your book describes how other countries protect and encourage the launch of their industries. Why doesn’t the United States do the same thing? Isn’t that a protectionist policy, which some economists oppose?
Most economists who extol the benefits of unrestricted free trade are living in an ivory tower and refuse to face what is happening in the real world. Free trade is a wonderful theory, and if every nation practiced it in the same way, we would have far fewer problems. But other nations, China, Japan and even some in Western Europe, have not truly embraced free trade. As a result, many goods and services that the United States would like to export to other countries and create jobs at home are blocked from entering those economies.
Every year, the U.S. trade representative compiles a report on the ways foreign governments block imports of U.S. products, the “National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers.” The 2011 version runs 329 pages and describes in detail how other nations discriminate against U.S. services and products.
Here’s a snapshot:
The European Union: After many years of negotiations, the E.U. maintains “significant barriers” to U.S. products “despite repeated efforts to resolve them.”
Japan: “The U.S. government has expressed concern with the overall lack of access to Japan’s automotive market, as well as with specific aspects of Japan’s regulatory system that limit the ability of U.S. automobile and related companies to expand in Japan.”
China: “Many U.S. industries complain that they face significant non-tariff barriers to trade ... These include regulations that set high thresholds for entry into service sectors ... and the use of questionable ... measures to control import volumes.”
What’s most troubling about the 2011 report is that it contains nothing new; every year the report reads essentially the same as the year before. The types of barriers change, but the obstacles remain, with the same result — many of our products cannot be sold in other countries.
Critics say free trade is best for the country in the long run. Your book debunks that. If it’s that conclusive, why do the free trade voices have so much sway in Congress?
The real deficit
U.S. global trade policies have wiped out millions of jobs and created a stagggering trade deficit: the world’s largest. The nation's main trading partners all run trade surpluses.
Source: World Trade Organization
Research by Monica Arpino, Michael Lawson; Graphic by Alissa Scheller, Investigative Reporting Workshop
Research by Monica Arpino, Michael Lawson; Graphic by Alissa Scheller, Investigative Reporting Workshop
Political influence — pure and simple. Multinational corporations want the freedom to export jobs and then bring goods made by cheap labor in their overseas factories back into the United States free of tariffs and taxes. Some industries, such as retailers, want the cheapest goods they can buy. Together, those two — and their allies in many foreign governments that are robust exporters to the United States — join hands to push for the adoption of free-trade agreements and lobby against any measures that would halt the unrestricted flow of imports into the United States. Smaller U.S. companies that employ American workers in the States always lose those battles.
For free trade to work, a nation’s imports and exports should be in relative balance. That’s the principle followed by all of our major trading partners. But imports into the United States have been out of balance ever since the 1970s, as each year imports overwhelm exports and drive up the trade deficit — now the world’s highest — all the while killing jobs. The United States has run up nearly $10 trillion in trade deficits since the mid-'70s, killing millions of good-paying jobs in the process.
You advocate limiting subsidized imports and insisting that foreign nations lower their barriers to our goods. Doesn’t that put the U.S. on a collision course with other growing economies, especially China, which holds billions of dollars of U.S. debt? Is the United States really able to negotiate with China on trade?
We can’t control China. But we can control our own economy by regulating what we permit to enter the country. Yet we have consistently refused to exercise that right. Yes, the Chinese hold a lot of our debt, but we are crucial to China’s economy, too. Whenever tough measures are suggested to enforce trade laws already on the books, the economic elite in the United States warn of repercussions from China as though the United States is powerless to control its own destiny. That’s just not true.
Your book blames a lopsided tax system that favors the rich while draining the middle class. How could Congress institute a simpler and fairer tax code?
Of all the economic challenges facing the middle class, the tax system should be the simplest to correct: What needs to be done is to reinstitute a series of tax rates that would apply largely to upper-income taxpayers. This would eliminate the inequity that has taxpayers who earn $379,000 paying federal taxes on their last earnings at the same rate as someone who earns $50 million a year.
Wealthiest pay less
Effective federal tax rate for Top 400 families
Sources: Top 400, 1955 and 1961: Janet McCubbin/Fritz Scheuren, Individual Income Tax Shares and Average Tax Rates, IRS, 1988 and 1989; 1995-2007: IRS, Statistics of Income, “The 400 Individual Income Tax Returns Reporting the Highest Adjusted Gross Incomes Each Year, 1992-2007.”
Research by Monica Arpino, Michael Lawson; Graphic by Alissa Scheller, Investigative Reporting Workshop
Anyone who suggests raising the rates on people at the top is accused of inciting class warfare. But this is nonsense. We are merely calling for a rollback to policies similar to those that long existed in the United States and helped bolster a growing middle class. Increasing the number of tax rates would restore fairness. Ever since the income tax was first levied, some critics have denounced any system that contained more than two or three rates as being too complex. What they really mean is that when there are more rates, the very wealthy have to pay more. A tax code with 10 rates is every bit as simple as a code with two rates.
Here’s a truly shocking statistic: If you were one of the richest Americans in 1955, you paid on average about 51.2 percent of your income in federal taxes. If you were one of the richest Americans in 2007, your tax rate had plummeted to an average of 16.6 percent. During that time, Congress has systematically cut tax rates for the rich; allowed certain income to be excluded; and enabled the wealthy to funnel vast amounts of money out of the Treasury through loopholes.
The justification for cutting the tax bills of the wealthy was to stimulate the economy and create jobs. Instead, it’s given us a wealth gap greater than at any time since the late 1920s, when a similar chasm between the rich and everyone else foreshadowed the Great Depression.
To restore a semblance of balance, the very rich should pay more. It wouldn’t affect their lifestyle. It would make our society as a whole more prosperous, which ultimately would benefit even the very rich. It also would dramatically reduce the deficit, which has soared in no small part because of $700 billion in tax cuts extended to the rich in the last 10 years.
Simplification of the tax code has been a Trojan Horse of the rich for years, luring people into thinking that fewer rates would mean a more equitable tax system, even though it means the opposite. U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan, the House budget chairman, and the Republican vice-presidential nominee, submitted a proposed budget earlier this year that he claimed would “simplify” the tax code by reducing the number of tax brackets and lowering the top rate on the wealthy. The tax code is complex, but the rates aren’t the cause. In fact, much of the code’s complexity stems from provisions inserted to benefit the wealthy.
If Congress were serious about making the tax code simpler and fairer, what might it do?
For starters, it could create an individual tax return that could be filed on a single sheet of paper. It would include all your income and the sources of that income — wages, interest, dividends, rental income and what’s now referred to as capital gains and royalties. In short, every dollar of gross income from whatever source derived.
The sum of all that income then would be multiplied by your tax rate. No deductions for any purpose. No tax credits. No personal exemptions. There would be multiple rates, possibly as many as a dozen, running up to a top rate of 70 percent, which would be applied to all income over, say, $10 million. Multiple rates would make certain that people in totally different economic circumstances would not be grouped in the same tax bracket, as is now the case.
Your book blames both parties for the country’s jobs deficit. It sounds hopeless. Is it?
It’s not hopeless, but in the near term it’s hopeless with this Congress and a tea party that masquerades as a friend of the middle class when, in fact, it really represents the interests of the super-rich. The hardening of positions in Washington is preventing the nation from even thinking about tackling our most difficult problems. This isn't the way it used to be.
Few people realize that the largest peacetime public works program in the nation’s history — the interstate highway system — was proposed and implemented under a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, with broad bipartisan support. It is hard to imagine the two parties, as now constituted in Congress, agreeing to any such ambitious program these days. Deficit hawks would scream that such a venture would just add red ink to the budget. But right now, investing in infrastructure, technology or some other promising field, would be a plus for job creation. Only when we start taking positive steps to help the middle class, and only when we recreate a political zone where politicians of both parties work together again, will we be able to get this country moving again.
Do you expect the issues raised in your book to become part of the presidential campaign?
The issues are already running through the campaign because they are the story of America in 2012. Both candidates are talking about the middle class, but neither is very specific on what he would do. Both are talking about taxes, though in much different ways. Mitt Romney’s proposals on taxes would be deadly for the middle class, lead to even more income inequality and do nothing to create additional jobs. Both have talked about China, but neither has faced the obvious need to fashion a more realistic policy on trade with all our trading partners.
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Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele have been working with the Investigative Reporting Workshop for the last two years to publish new stories about ongoing economic hardships on working Americans. These stories, and additional research, are now part of a new book, "The Betrayal of the American Dream," now a New York Times best-seller.
Barlett and Steele are contributing editors at Vanity Fair magazine. They have worked together for four decades, first at The Inquirer (1971-1997), where they won two Pulitzer Prizes and scores of other national journalism awards, then at Time magazine (1997-2006), where they earned two National Magazine Awards, and since 2006 at Vanity Fair. They also have written seven books, including the New York Times No. 1 best-seller "America: What Went Wrong?" — an expanded version of the 1991 Inquirer series. Both live in Philadelphia. You can email the writers at info@barlettandsteele.com.