The majority of today's pieces are a cool rejection of Dubya and his policies.
The first editorial proposes, "If the Bush administration is planning to trumpet Alan Greenspan's endorsement for making the president's tax cuts permanent, it has to accept...[his] warning to Congress this week that it ought to scale back spending on Social Security and other government programs...." It then notes these cuts "would be extremely hard to sell to the public, and they would not be enough to solve all the looming entitlement problems." On tax cuts and the deficits, Dubya has been totally irresponsible and wants to pass the bill for the current federal services to future generations. As long as Dubya can frame the debate as his opponents want to raise your taxes, he wins. It is good to see the Times discuss what it really takes to for the government to afford Dubya's tax cuts.
The second blasts Dubya for acting to kill "two crucial gun-control measures" that he "has long been on record supporting". The third is on the problems with Milosevic's trial, but fails to present an ideas about what should be done better. The Editorial Observer is on the rise of Google.
The summary of the signed pieces are below.
Krugman is back from vacation and has the
best piece on free trade I have seen. He says, "[I]t is as true as ever that the U.S. economy would be poorer and less productive if we turned our back on world markets." But he adds, "[F]ree trade is politically viable only if it's backed by effective job creation measures and a strong domestic social safety net." I used to be a big believer in NAFTA-type agreements, but know I am questioning their value.
Here is a report on the NAFTA study that found that after three years, a small number of net jobs was created, but those created jobs involved dislocating almost 10 times as many people from their jobs. Job dislocations have huge personal costs.
This study found that NAFTA "eliminated 766,030 actual and potential U.S. jobs between 1994 and 2000" and "contributed to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened collective bargaining powers and ability to organize unions, and reduced fringe benefits." Why should the government be pursuing more NAFTA-type agreements when the results from NAFTA have been so poor? I am not saying we should scrap NAFTA as that would be a bad precedent. However, I think we should be much smarter in the future.
In the discussion of outsourcing, no one mentions the L-1 program. The L-1 program, per this article, "allows companies to transfer workers from overseas offices to the United States for up to seven years - ostensibly to familiarize them with corporate culture or to import workers with 'specialized knowledge.'" What this turns into is that companies get to bring professionals in from India and pay them way below market rates for working in the United States. I personally have lost a job when my team in IT was replaced by a L-1 team. I have since worked with other L-1 individuals who were brought in instead of American programmers. It is my understanding the General Electric's entire US staff of IT developers are L-1 workers from India. Yet, I can find nothing that describes the L-1 program on the Immigration Service web site.
Bob Herbert visits an engaged gay couple "to see this threat to the very foundation of civilization close up" and doesn't find anything worth outlawing.
Mimi Swartz, a long-time Texas political reporter, discusses the politics of the lack of research into Dubya's National Guard service. She finds that Dubya was not truthful when he said on "Meet the Press" that his complete Guard records were "scoured". But she never addresses a basic question - why didn't the press demand the complete records be released until recently? She lays the blame on the Richards then the Gore campaign, but none of the current Democratic nominees pushed the issue either. She notes that "Walter Robinson of The Boston Globe...[wrote]...in May 2000 that Mr. Bush did not perform flight drills while in Alabama, and that the commander of the Alabama unit didn't remember him showing up for duty." Then she adds, "But even that story was soon eclipsed by others in the heat of the campaign." Stories like what? There were no major stories between May and the conventions in July. As the Daily Howler has documented many times, the press just choose to ignore it in favor of discussing Gore's wardrobe.