Trade deficit hurts economy

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/5948

Trade deficit hurts economy - 05/18/07

Lede: The U.S. continues to run up huge record trade deficits - now more than $3 trillion in the past six years alone. As Doug Cunningham reports, it’s hurting the country.

By Doug Cunningham

Bob Baugh is Executive Director of the AFL-CIO's Industrial Union Council. He says these trade deficits are dangerous, unsustainable, and caused by a policy designed to benefit multinational corporations at the expense of workers around the world.

: "People want to act like this is an act of God. Or it's like the weather and you can't do a damn thing about it. And that's a flat-out lie. This is a system that is run by rules, and the set of rules have been comprised and made up by global corporations who do this in their own self-interest. It is a system made up of rules that are made by corporations and the governments that are complicit with them and it’s time to change it."

AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee says U.S. trade policies aren’t just damaging workers.

: “This isn’t just labor, but it’s also business and agriculture that are all being hurt by our trade policies.”

Baugh says it’s clear that current trade deficits are costing Americans jobs and we need transformed trade policies that are really in our national interest.

: "Every one of those dollars certainly represents jobs that have gone away from here and are being produced elsewhere, or could be produced here and are not.”

[Rydz777]

1. There are so many chickens that are going to come home to

roost that it will look like Hitchcock's "The Birds." Massively exporting jobs while massively importing goods is not sound economic policy. Under Bush, we have lost one out of every six manufacturing jobs, and as we buy virtually everything we use from overseas, the dollar sinks in a sea of debt.