Phillips notes, "Indeed, German, Japanese, and Swiss export prowess puts the once-mighty United States to shame. In 2003 and 2004 the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods rose from $470billion to $552 billion. The three better-balanced economies, by contrast, enjoyed huge surpluses in trade in manufactured goods and large ones in their overall current accounts. A set of statistics will demonstrate the point. Estimates for 2004 provided by the CIA in mid-2005 put Germany first in the world with $893 billion in exports (mostly manufactured goods)—this from a national population of 82 million. The united states places second with exports, dwarfed by $1.3 trillion worth of imports. The Japanese, chalking up the world’s third-highest export total, $538 billion, did so with a national population of 127 million. Pocket-sized Switzerland was even more of a per capita powerhouse: with a national population of only 7.5 million $131 billion worth of goods in 2004."
Most Republicans and Reagan Democrats over the past 28 years have failed to read Kevin Phillips, even though Phillips is the Republican architect of most of the Post-1960 rebirth of the Republican party in the USA.
NEEDING TO END THE HEAD IN THE SAND ON BAD ECONOMICS
I recall this head-in-the-sand approach to Phillips at Texas A& M in a graduate school history seminar. In review of Phillip’s writings, I observed one Reagan-Republican classmate (a doctoral candidate) stand up and say that Phillips, in his WEALTH AND DEMOCRACY and THE POLITICS OF RICH AND POOR, was simply using his own liberal and uninformed statistics to make his case. In short, he was poo-pooing facts and well researched documents on the hollowing out of the Middle Class in the USA in the 1980s and 1990s.
This particular doctoral student was simply going through college life assuming that everything is an argument and nothing matters but point of view—i.e. not statistics or facts on the ground. This politicization of logic in the US academia mirrored what was happening in the herd mentality in U.S. politics and political economics since the 1960s.
Americans have got to get their feet on the ground and stop believing facts are always political.
Both the U.S. and the UK were full of information and in-the-know- critiques, such as those of economist Paul Krugman, who have made clear over the past two decades that the overemphasis on the financial sector was no-go in the long run. Moreover, the hollowing out of the social commitment of the state to the non-retired American citizen was also fodder for critique and alarm by Phillips, Krugman and others dating back to 1980 when John Anderson walked out of the Republican Party and ran against Ronald Reagan and voodoo economics.
Meanwhile, the Republican takeover, reigned over by William (Bill) Clinton in the 1990s, only continued the hallowing out of the U.S. social and mass transport infrastructure at a national level.
POST-INDUSTRIALISM--A DEAD END?
As many Americans, have been noting, i.e. as more and more jobs, companies and investments leave the USA over the NAFTA era, post-industrialism can be a dead-end to certain facets of many of America’s (and Mexico’s) local economies. We can't allow the old-mentality that OUR COUNTRY CAN'T AFFORD TO HELP THE POOR AND THE HURTING.
If we can help out wealthy and hurting bankers and financiars--and other scoundrels to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars in 2008 alone--we have to get it clear that we could have done better in the social contracts of the past 3 decades than to end up bailing out bad debtors. We could have competed with Switzerland, Germany, and Japan on providing high wages and high quality of life to our citizens.
Meanwhile, the bailouts of Wall Street's banks is going to be over one-trillion dollars in 2008 and 2009. So, Americans need to collar the government leaders in these November 2008 elections. We must notify them of change.
I suggest one way of doing this is to vote for third party progressive candidates (and any other real progressives who are lucky to be on the big tent party tickets) who are willing to help out homeowners and debtors.
We also need to return to a progressive tax system to pay off the big 30-year party on Wall Street and in the Financial Industry in the USA and around the globe.
Please comment below what other progressive political economic change is needed as of 2009 below in the comment section. (For example, health care for all!!)
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