Check the label on your Nikes, your Apple computers, your UCLA
sweaters. Made in China, assembled in Korea, hecho en Mexico. It
may seem like just one pair of shoes, one computer and one sweater,
until you multiply it by every one you’ve ever bought.
Now look around. Try and find one thing in Ackerman Union made
in America. Ask students on campus where their goods are made.
Getting the picture? Here’s a frame ““ America’s
unprecedented $600 billion trade deficit.
Should you be scared? Should you feel like a traitor to your
nation? After Google-ing my fingers to the bone and having heated
pressroom debates with my editor, intense discussions with a very
patient UCLA senior economist and many futile phone calls to the
White House, the answer is yes. And no.
Reasons to be scared: With every purchase of a Nike shoe or UCLA
hat made in China, we increase our national trade deficit and, by
extension, the grip foreign countries have on our economy. A
sizable chunk of our trade deficit is comprised of imported
American products made in foreign countries. Except American
companies don’t have to pay import tariffs because the
products are “American.”
This is called vertical disintegration, or
“outsourcing.” Shipping jobs abroad expands foreign
economies while shrinking ours. We “invest” abroad by
buying goods not made here, then slap familiar brand-name labels on
them. Look at your designer UCLA hat and fashionable Nikes and see
the hands of underpaid Chinese laborers at the sweatshop end of a
dime-on-the-dollar global assembly line.
If that’s true, how can our economy be growing?
Don’t we outpace every other economy on the planet? The Cato
Institute, a conservative think tank that is also the head
cheerleader for privatizing Social Security, is more than happy to
forecast blue skies. According to the institute, the supposed
crisis is actually a sign of prosperity.
“There is no emergency. The trade deficit is not a sign of
economic distress but of rising domestic demand and
investment,” testified Cato policy wonk Daniel Griswold to
the Senate Finance Committee.
In other words, as goes the conservative fairy-tale argument, we
have more money to spend than other countries; that’s why we
buy more of their goods than they do ours.
Now check your wallet (the one probably made in China). Witness
the source of our prosperity. It gleams divine when hit by
sunlight. Over 641 million credit cards are encased in the wallets
of American consumers ““ the backbone of our economy ““
who, through $2 trillion of debt, fuel the “domestic demand
and investment.”
It’s plastic, it’s magical, it’s your credit
card. Buying things you don’t need with money you don’t
have ““ the contemporary American passport to the
heaven’s gate of “prosperity.”
But this prosperity offers some reasons to feel like a traitor.
Vladimir Lenin, the architect of applied socialism, famously said
that a capitalist would sell rope to his own hangman. Now we are
actually buying the rope.
“The reality is, our current trade policies are not
working. The middle class is shrinking. Poverty is growing. Average
Americans are working longer hours for low wages, and our
disastrous trade policy is one of the factors,” said Rep.
Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., in a recent FOX News interview.
“We’re getting killed. And we’re selling out the
middle class of this country.”
But if this is actually a crisis ““ one perhaps more
immediate than the Social Security crisis looming 40 years from now
““ why isn’t our president out there Bible-thumping on
the bully pulpit for Americans to buy American, for Christ’s
sake?
“I don’t know. If I were sinister or conspiratorial,
I’d say it’s because of those contributors telling him
to maintain the status quo so they can continue to keep
outsourcing,” said UCLA Anderson Forecast senior economist
Michael Bazdarich. “Why don’t you call him and find
out?”
I did. Guess what ““ the White House did not return my
phone calls. Again.
Under current trade policies, an “hourglass” economy
has developed. In 2003 alone, 4.3 million people, some from the
middle class, have fallen below the official poverty line, creating
a grand total of 35.9 million. At the same time, the main
beneficiaries of the current “jobless recovery” have
been corporations, taking 47 percent of the income increase in the
last two years, as opposed to the 15 percent that trickled down to
salaries.
The biggest irony might be that we are killing ourselves without
knowing it. Bazdarich suggests that Americans are unique for their
unpatriotic preference to buy “fashionable” foreign
goods such as BMWs rather than all-American Fords.
But how many of us are actually conscious of that attitude? Even
products made by American companies are manufactured abroad. Try to
go into Ackerman and buy something you want, made by an American
company, that’s actually made in America.
So am I a traitor for buying a UCLA hat made in China?
“If you’re a traitor, then there’re a lot of
other traitors out there,” Bazdarich said. A lot, indeed. At
least now I finally have something in common with our president.
Probably the biggest traitors of all are the corporate traders
exporting our economy.
If you’re not content with being like our president, and
you find yourself in Ackerman with a UCLA hat in one hand and a
moral dilemma on the other, Bazdarich has an encouraging
thought.
“If enough UCLA students walk into Ackerman and demand to
have UCLA hats made in America, they will do it,” he
said.
Sounds like a challenge.
Lukacs is a third-year history student. E-mail him at
olukacs@media.ucla.edu.