Mitt Romney, as I've noted, has been heating up the issue of Obama's failure to stop China's currency manipulation.
This currency manipulation is a big distorter of our trade with China, and therefore a big driver of America's trade deficit, which makes it a big driver of job loss and deindustrialization.
Romney is promising to do something about this problem, though, as I've written, it's not 100 percent clear whether he intends to keep his promises on this issue or not.
He's running an ad attacking the administration.
Which is hitting back with an ad of its own, below, calling Romney a phony on the issue because, in his days at Bain Capital, companies his firm controlled were involved in outsourcing American jobs:
This is, frankly, a dumb criticism.
If America's laws and policy environment are set up so that it is legal to, for example, make furniture in cheap-labor nations overseas and import it to the U.S., then companies in this industry either have to match the cost of the importers or go broke.
Which usually, in an industry where labor is the main cost of production susceptible to change, means moving production offshore themselves.
There may be limited exceptions for special niche products or goods that are beyond the industrial sophistication of such nations, but other than that, individual companies really don't have the option of defying the overall economic environment.
This is not an abstraction. I've worked in industries, like the garment trade, where foreign labor costs set the industry's pricing structure. We may not have liked it, and we might have preferred a different U.S. government policy that would have enabled us to afford to employ American labor and still make a profit. But we were stuck.
Any one-firm heroics on our part would just have resulted in our not being there anymore.
So when Bain Capital was investing in industries open to competition from low-wage nations, they didn't have a whole lot of choice about offshoring. Some, maybe, but not a lot.
Therefore, I don't think Mitt Romney is a "hypocrite" to have rationally responded, as a businessman, to the policy environment of 10 years ago and want, today, to change that environment.
Whether he intends to keep his promises is still an open question, but I don't think anything he's done as a businessman proves, per se, that he doesn't.
Some issues in our economy simply cannot be meaningfully responded to at the level of individual people or individual companies. They are systemic, macro-scale issues where our government is the only entity that can provide a solution.
There are legitimate criticisms of Bain Capital to be made. This isn't one of them.
Obama-Romney outsourcing feud continues - CBS News
Obama, Romney square off on China, jobs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rkgx1C_S6ls
Do you think as a negotiator, as he proved when he was at Bain, he would know when to walk away from a bad deal? No matter how much screaming and hollering the leaders of fast developing nations do would he walk away from a bad deal for American Workers?
In the Old West sometimes a town had to hire a gun slinger for protection!
Maybe we need an unsavory Gunslinger?
Liberals who want to lay the blame on the Conservatives are still in denial. The Democrat/Green Parties are just as Globalist as the Republican/Libertarians. Stop denying it. Unfortunately we need ''you people' to create a new political party that is anti-Globalist.
It created a rust belt in America, as Japan expanded into China and resold goods assembled in Japan to the world. The trade deficit constantly increased and caused America to increase borrowing, not a good thing.. It added inflation to the economy, good for gov't and business but not the people. Japan became more powerful and they were able to globalize in competition with American exports, not a good thing.
Insanity is repeating the same mistake and expecting a different result. Strengthen the Yuan and you strengthen China, We strengthened the Yen and that strengthened Japan, a competitor. Strengthen the USD and you will strengthen America, unless of course your focus is on global free trade. The Free Trade experiment has been America's downfall. Facts speak for themselves. After free trade began, corporations globalized and blossomed, while American workers withered on the vine. Is that too complicated to understand? Economics are a simple domino process that are enveloped in mystique and their own particular language. Before the Fed there was Boom & Bust, With the Fed there's Boom & Bust.
Too bad we don't have a functional Congress devoid of obstructionists (GOP and Blue Dog democrats) who solve problems.
Federal funding ($300 billion to start) PACE loans allowing homeowners to purchase roof top solar panels would go a long way to reduce our energy deficit, stimulate demand, manufacturing and job creation, with payoff typically in ten years, followed by 25 to 30 years useful free energy production. People would naturally want more panels to power/charge electric cars.
Effectively releasing pent up demand for electric cars, reduce our energy trade deficit massively, and most importantly, reduce CO2 emissions.
And where would $300 billion come from? Since Exxon and other oil companies pay zero tax, 35% minimum tax would cover the tab, both for loan interest and solar manufacturing subsidies.
The general public largely doesn't notice. Long as everyone involved in Congressional/corporate entanglement have no integrity (what you do when no one's looking), then apparently, according to you, and Romney, and perhaps the author, it's all legit. Awesome.
Romney is a hypocrite, because he claims to be strong against a country he has repeatedly done business with. He could be touting it that way, as someone to work with them, but he is not. I don't get it either.
My only real point, was that people are making a huge deal about outsourcing, while they use their I-phone(major outsourcing), and other foreign made products. I did not defend Mitt Romney, but people need to be fair about their criticisms, and the point you make is valid.
The Treasury prints paper bearing interest, termed Bonds/TBills, and the Fed prints paper termed Currency.. They exchange their paper and the Fed holds the Bonds/Bills and the Treasury spends the currency. The only people burdened in the process are the Taxpayers. The Fed's currency cost nothing, it wasn't earned or borrowed, so why should the Taxpayer be burdened? The answer, accounting discipline of course. .Otherwise the Treasury might go on a wild spending spree. Well the rules didn't stop GWB did they.
Hundreds of billions in foreign gov't loans are forgiven at Taxpayer expense,.the holders of corporate treasury paper write it off in bankruptcy, so what is wrong with the Fed simple writing off some of the Federal Treasury paper that the Fed holds in inventory? Who is hurt? It doesn't harm the Fed or threaten the Fed 's survival. It simply takes a burden off the Taxpayer and frees the gov't to start fresh. Oh yes, it does violate those rules of accounting, but nothing more. Any argument about the result of this on confidence etc. is only speculation.and not fact.
So may I note:
1) I did not, have not, and (almost certainly) will not endorse Romney for president.
2) I merely pointed out that one argument against him, on one issue, doesn't hold water.
3) I am not a fan of offshoring. Indeed, I wrote a book attacking it.
4) I never said that offshoring was OK "because it is legal." It isn't, and being legal doesn't make things OK anyway.
Most of the angry responses to my argument seem to come from people who have never worked in an executive capacity in an industry facing foreign competition. They seem to think you can just *decide* to employ $15/hr American labor when your product has to survive competition with firms producing the same thing with $2/hr foreign labor. You (usually) can't.
I would very much prefer that American workers not be put in this position, but it will take a Federal trade policy change, not quixotic gestures by individual companies, to bring this about. So please stop demanding that individual businessmen do something they can't. I might as well badger my critics on this about owning Chinese-made bath towels.
I have friends running operations in China their industrial electricity rates when they actually get a bill is 1/7 what I have to pay here in California.
Do you really think we lost the highly automated low labor cost high energy cost manufactures of solar cells manufactures like Solyndra, Spectrawatt and Evergreen Solar because of labor cost?
China last year burnt 49+% of all the coal consumed on the planet! They have discovered 19th century England's secrete!
Finally...a voice of reason.
Beside Obama want to cut the intensives for companies outsourcing jobs, Romney want's to keep them. So tell me, who is for the American Blue Collars and who is for the American Wing Collar !
Yes he has.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/12/obama-jobs-council-outsourcing_n_1666443.html