What To Look Forward To In An Obama Administration
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Economic Ignorance | Free Trade — Comments (5) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
More stuff like this. At what point does that whole "reality" portion of "reality-based community" take hold? You can't possibly convince people that you are in touch with the facts concerning trade when you argue that free trade has caused "devastation" to the American people. And it is high time that the Obama campaign and Democratic candidates across the board get confronted with the facts on trade--and you can find a fair amount of them referenced in the linked post.
I think the "reality-based community" should finally be confronted with reality. In fact, I am surprised that it hasn't happened sooner.
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What To Look Forward To In An Obama Administration 5 Comments (0 topical, 5 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
Anyone up yet to clean this filth up?
This may surprise you,
but polls show that a majority of even self-described Republican voters now agree that "free trade has been bad for the U.S. economy."
Free trade has become a scapegoat for the visceral fear Americans have that their workers are being priced out of the global market. I've even heard from some Republicans who said that their own jobs got outsourced.
Defending free trade in the abstract is not going to sell in this election year. As I keep saying, an election year is NOT the time to be educating Americans on the benefits of free trade. The GOP had years to do that, to explain to the public the benefits of each of the trade agreements Bush signed and Congress passed--but they didn't bother to make the case.
What is needed is to address the very real issue of these dislocations in the economy. Foreign competition and computerization are causing rapid changes in the U.S. workforce. And while young mobile workers can deal with that, an older guy with a family, a mortgage, kids in school, etc., can't easily just pull up stakes and move across the country to take a much lower wage job somewhere else.
As with health care, as with global warming, the GOP has to get out in front of all these issues and propose their own, market-based solutions. But they have to stop ignoring the issues or pretending they're not legitimate issues. That's just going to lead to electoral disaster.
I am one of them..!
"polls show that a majority of even self-described Republican voters now agree that "free trade has been bad for the U.S. economy."
