I recently read a diary that said
Life is becoming harder and harder for most people and the prospects for the future are not good. More jobs will be exported.
I responded with:
Jobs are not exported. Goods are exported or imported, not jobs.
I thought back to the Great Depression. Wikipedia says the following about tariffs and the great depression.
When the Great Depression hit, international trade shrank drastically. The crisis baffled the GOP, and it unwisely tried its magic one last time in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. This time it backfired, as Canada, Britain, Germany, France and other industrial countries retaliated with their own tariffs and special, bilateral trade deals. American imports and exports both went into a tailspin.
The real problem we are facing is a declining US standard of living. A declining standard of living also played a role with Saudis joining Al-Qaeda and the reason the World Trade Center was a target. The belief being that the US was robbing Saudis of their oil wealth.
The declining standard of living is an allocation of resources problem. Resources are allocated based on where money is spent. Right now the rich are not investing money in the US, rather they are saving their money and not investing at all, except in companies supplying goods to the military. The problem with supplying goods to the military is that those goods do nothing to raise the standard of living of people. Instead they lower the standard of living by removing resources that could be used to maintain or raise the standard of living.
Another issue is that we are constantly becoming more efficient. If that efficiency is not used to provide more goods to the people, but is instead used to justify providing fewer goods (i.e. pay fewer people less to produce goods and hence have fewer people able to buy goods) then again the standard of living is lowered as opposed to raising the standard of living as more efficiency should.
Another issue is the employment of workers who are willing to accept significantly less money for the same amount of work. This is the so call "exporting jobs" issue. The real issue here is that workers should receive roughly equivalent pay for doing the same work. This should not mean reducing US workers' salaries, but increasing the salaries of those who work abroad. Workers should not be committing suicide because they are forced to work long hours for little money. I will not purchase an iPad or a Dell computer because workers in the factory that produces those products committed suicide because they were forced to work long hours for little pay. I believe trade agreements need to be negotiated so that we do not import goods from countries that do not allow unions or pay their workers adequately. We should also insist our trading partners educate their populace.
Another issue is currency. We should not trade with countries that artificially keep the value of their currency low. Again China is guilty of this.
We need better allocation of resources. To do this we should tax the rich, improve our infrastructure, tax carbon, do clean energy research and development, provide tax benefits for those who use clean energy, hire more educators from pre-k to post graduate, and on and on.
Being only concerned about "exporting jobs" is a path to failure. We need to be concerned about raising the standard of living for ourselves and everyone else.
Update
I have read the 48 comments posted here. I am currently unemployed and seeking a job. There is no question in my mind that my job search is made more difficult by the numerous well educated foreign workers who are either willing to come to the US or to do similar work in a foreign country. I do not believe the jobs I am willing to do have been exported.
I never said trade barriers made/caused the Great Depression or made the Great Depression worse. I did say that the barriers caused import / export problems for the US.
To those who say our standard of living is rising, I say that there are millions without jobs whose standard of living is declining. I am worried about those people. There is also no question that the US infrastructure is declining. The decline of US infrastructure is also causing job loss.
The main problem with job loss is a lack of people who have the money to purchase goods. This in turn is partly due to fewer jobs because of poor resource allocation and partly due to low wages. Changing these two problems, i.e. paying workers more be they US workers or foreign workers is key. Allocating resources better is an important factor to job creation.
I believe most people who commented fail to see the forest for the trees. They need to climb a mountain and look at the forest and use binoculars to see the trees. Being stuck with only one perspective leads to a path to failure.
As to my remark on the Saudi economy and Al-Qaeda I quote from Al Qaeda & Oil Facilities in the Midst of the Global Economic Crisis
Peter Bergen in his book "The Osama I know: the Oral History of al-Qaeda’s leader", which is based on interviews with people who knew al-Qaeda’s leader in various stages of his life provides some significant insight into the significance of "Muslim oil" from bin Laden’s perspective. This represents the Salafi-jihadists general understanding of the matter in general. They believe that Muslims do not benefit from their "main wealth", because the West, and the US in particular, supports and protects "apostate" Arab regimes to "guarantee the flow of oil", therefore, attacks on the oil interests would threaten the coalition between both parties on the one hand, and will "expel the Americans" from the region, on the other. In other words this means that the attacks on oil interests would hit both the "far enemy" and "close enemy" together, and then the wealth will be guaranteed to go back to the hands of Muslim Ummah (nation).
I one considers economic trends in Saudi Arabia then one observes a general decline in income to Saudi Arabia which translates into less money for the Saudis and a decline of Saudi living standards.