FREE TRADE

I have been a free trader for most of my career, and I still believe free trade works in the long run. By the long run I mean a generation. In the short run there are clearly big winners and losers. This administration and this country has been oblivious to the para dime shift that has been occurring.

Trade is a heated issue. With all kinds of pro and con arguments. Trade costs jobs. Trade creates jobs. Trade allows us to buy cheap manufactured goods, trade opens up markets for us. We've all heard them to the point where people can't distinguish between the forest and the trees.

To me the test of whether trade is good or bad is simple. Follow the money. When you play monopoly, at the end of the game the winner is the one with all the money, hotels and houses. In terms of trade China has all our money, almost a trillion in reserves, and they are be able to buy our hotels , houses , companies and resources. This is not rocket science. We borrow and spend, and they save and invest and sell. This is a transfer of wealth at a speed and magnitude never before witnessed. We have tun trade and current deficits on a scale never before seen by any country in the history of the planet. When you have two billion people increasing their living standards as rapidly as has been occurring over the last two decades only a fool can think its not coming at some one's expense. Together with the transfer of wealth that is occurring to the oil producers and the cost of the war it's no wonder we are going broke.

What should have been done and still needs to be done, in my opinion is to have trade policies that slow this thing down. So that this monumental shift can take place over a greater length of time. We need to buy time to adjust to compete with these low wage behemoths without health care or environmental constraints. We need to keep jobs and dollars circulating in this country rather than sending them abroad. We should provide ourselves some time to fix our health care system retrain our workforce change our economic policies away from consumption to savings and investment, instead of allowing ourselves to be pillaged.