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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 3/21/16

Fact-Check This: Arrogance Of Elites Helps Drive The Trump Phenomenon

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Reprinted from Campaign For America's Future

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For some time now most of the people in this country have been under economic pressure. Pay is not going up very much or at all, while living costs keep rising. One recent statistic stands out -- 63 percent of Americans would have difficulty raising $500 to cover an emergency, like a sudden need for car repair so they can get to work. Around them the community's roads and schools and services are in decline.

Most of the public can see this clearly, yet so many elites can't see at all, and see it or not, they do little or nothing to make things better. This arrogance of our blind, well-fixed elites is helping drive the Donald Trump phenomenon.

Among the "establishment" -- the people "in charge" of our "system," including the news and opinion elites who serve as gatekeepers of information -- there is willful blindness to how things have been getting worse for millions of Americans and their communities. They tell the voters they are wrong, that our trade policies are actually good for them.

The voters turn to Trump, who promises he will make it all better, that it will be beautiful.

No one else (aside from Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders) inspires a comparable level of hope.

Magazines Are Good For Us

A perfect example of that elite blindness is last week's Washington Post "Fact Checker" piece, "Trump's trade rhetoric, stuck in a time warp" by Glenn Kessler.

According to Kessler, Trump "appears to have not been reading newspapers or economic magazines enough to understand that globalization has changed the face of the world economy, for good or bad. In an interconnected world, it's no longer a zero sum game in which jobs are either parked in the United States or overseas."

Right, magazines. That's the ticket. Trump (and his supporters) should read more magazines that publish elites like Kessler, who can use a lot of big words like "globalization" and "interconnected" and tell laid-off workers to suck it up because it's "no longer a zero sum game" and that's that. Too bad for you. If they would only read more magazines they would understand why moving their jobs out of the country is good for all of us.

The Trade Deficit Is Good For Us

On Trump's complaints about the trade deficit, Kessler writes, "Trump frequently suggests the United States is 'losing money' when there is a trade deficit, but that reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. Americans want to buy these products from overseas, either because of quality or price."

This is simply an astonishing statement. In 2015, the U.S. had a goods trade deficit of $758.9 billion. We have closed so many factories here and moved the jobs there that we paid out $758.9 billion more for imports than we received from exports. That did not happen because "Americans want to buy these products from overseas"; that happened because the owners of the factories wanted to dodge American wages and environmental protection costs, and move production to places where workers are made to live in barracks, forced to stand for 10 hours, and get paid squat.

Moving Jobs Out Of The Country Is Good For Us

Then Kessler gets into the old game of saying that moving the jobs out of the country is good for us because we all get to pay lower prices.

Kessler also says all those jobs aren't gone because we moved millions and millions of jobs out of the country so investors could pay lower wages, pollute all they want and pocket all of the savings; no, the jobs are gone because of "increased productivity."

"The manufacturing sector has declined as a source of jobs in the United States, but again Trump would be fighting against economic shifts long in the making. American manufacturing has becomes incredibly productive, so fewer workers are needed to make the same number of goods."

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Dave has more than 20 years of technology industry experience. His earlier career included technical positions, including video game design at Atari and Imagic. He was a pioneer in design and development of productivity and educational (more...)
 

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