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American Empire Comes At A Very High Price
By Cynthia Tucker
09/03/08 "Yahoo" --- - Once upon a time, the United States was
the world's most powerful economic engine, a job-producing
machine that propelled a broad swath of its citizens into a
comfortable middle class. They bought tidy little houses they
could afford. They bought big, shiny Chevrolets and Fords with
bench seats.
They used their health insurance to pay for the occasional
tonsillectomy or appendectomy. They retired with pensions
generous enough to purchase nice gifts for the grandkids.
That period of broad prosperity was relatively short, no more
than 50 years after the end of World War II, but it looms large
in the national psyche, supplying the cultural icons and
touchstones that furnish the "American dream." And that era
depended as much on the weakness of other nations -- the
backwardness of China and India as well as the postwar
devastation of Europe -- as it did on American enterprise.
But it's a tricky business to announce to voters that the golden
age is over. Just ask any of the current crop of presidential
candidates.
As the era of widely shared prosperity staggers to its end,
globalization -- "NAFTA" is the shorthand -- looks like the
enemy, a con job foisted on ordinary Americans by greedy
corporations and pointy-headed intellectuals. There may be a bit
of truth to that.
Back in the '90s, when not just hard-core Republicans like Newt
Gingrich were proselytizing for free trade but also moderate
Democrats like Richard Rubin, the consensus was that everybody
would benefit -- eventually. It was President Clinton's version
of a "rising tide lifts all boats." A few good jobs would be
lost here and there, but many more would materialize. Granted,
that was the "macro" -- or big picture -- view, usually sold by
tenured economics professors who'd never seen a pink slip, or by
Wall Street titans with mansions in Provence and Monets in the
master bedroom.
The micro view, down where ordinary folk are struggling to make
ends meet, has turned out to be quite a bit harsher. Even before
the telltale winds of recession blew in, average workers were
struggling with the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, which
left for cheaper terrain in China and Vietnam, taking with them
middle-class wages and benefits.
It also turns out that the effects of globalization may be more
severe than the experts anticipated. Princeton economist Alan
Blinder, a longtime proponent of free trade, now says that it
will create more severe social and economic upheavals than he
once thought. He predicts that between 30 million and 40 million
Americans jobs are likely to be shipped overseas in the next 10
to 20 years. Not only will the lunch-bucket crowd feel the pain,
but college-educated, white-collar types will, too, as
occupations such as graphic designer, film and video editor,
financial analyst, microbiologist and, ironically, economist are
outsourced.
That doesn't mean the next president should scuttle old trade
pacts and build a wall of protectionism. Globalization will
continue to push labor to the cheapest locations; any effort to
change that outcome will likely create more problems than it
solves.
Nor does it mean that the United States is consigned to a future
of penury, with jobless workers living in shantytowns. Great
Britain and Germany boast successful economies that produce jobs
while still providing substantial safety nets, including
universal health care. (And those citizens are perfectly happy
with their health care, despite what you've heard from American
right-wing talk show hosts.)
Our government could spend money to generate jobs rebuilding
roads and bridges. We can fund vast investments in solar and
wind power and energy-efficient technology. To have money for
that, we'd have to give up the idea of empire -- projecting our
might around the world -- as the Europeans have done. They
couldn't afford it. We can't, either.
But we seem unable to face this simple fact: We've spent nearly
$750 billion on Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001, according to
the Congressional Budget Office, and most of it was money we
didn't have.
Not one of the remaining political candidates -- not Hillary
Clinton or Barack Obama, much less John McCain -- talks about
significantly downsizing the military-industrial complex and
decreasing our military footprint around the world. Superpowers
are darned expensive, and the United States simply doesn't have
the money for all that anymore.
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