Today the population of the USA is about 310 million and approximately 150 million of us seek or require jobs to live. Nearly 15 million workers are now unemployed,and many have been for more than two years. Job loses have permeated every class of worker from the highly skilled college graduate to typical blue collared workers. Typical workers who are employed are facing lower pay and higher cost of living than just 10 years ago. The median pay of American workers has declined in real terms since 1960, and will very probably sink further as unemployment increases and our workers compete with workers in developing sectors of the world in Africa, China, Indonesia, South America, India, Central Asia and numerous other countries whose workers pay in dollars is often less than 30% of the minimum USA pay of $7.75 per hour. Even technical service jobs that once paid about $40,000 annually for US workers have been replace in such countries as India with equally skilled workers paid about $10,000 annually.Our country's once reasonably paid workers, who were able to own a home, send their children to college, and save for retirement, are essentially unable to do so now. The rich have generally prospered whose income is at least 200 to 500 times greater than the median worker's wage of about $22,000 annually, that is declining steadily in real purchasing power, as the rich top 4 million of us continue to gain more economic power and wealth.
The reason behind this degradation of the US standard of living for typical workers that began about about 1960 is that we no longer employ workers who would otherwise buy products that they produce in our country. The corporations in the USA that once employed millions of our workers to manufacture the products that we also purchased are now employing millions of people elsewhere in low cost labor countries who are being paid a small fraction of what our workers were once paid. The rich corporate executives, financial executives and investors, famous sports people, entertainment icons and those who inherited their wealth continue to prosper beyond comparison to the typical worker in our country. Underlying this destructive economic imbalance is an often neglected factor that explains the depth of the economic problem facing the workers in our country and the extreme difficulty to reverse course.
Since 1960 our trade balance (referred to as balance of trade, BOT) has declined from a high positive number (surplus) to nearly the worst negative value (deficit) in the last half century. In other words we are buying more imports than we are selling our workers made exports. The trade balance shows how our workers spend the money they earn and who that money actually benefits. Over the last 50 years an approximate four billion dollar a year trade surplus has bexome a trade deficit of about $600 to $900 billion annually. Simply stated, in 1960 our population of about 180 million people(about 90 million workers)supplied much of the rest of the world with products, the workers in the USA created a net surplus per worker of nearly $50 per year. Overall employment was essentially 100% of the work force and the unemployment rate of about 5% was equal to the steady value representing "normalcy" compared to over 15 million or nearly 10% who are officially unemployed now..
Now, instead of a trade surplus each US worker(approximately 150 million if all were employed, and at least 15 million are unable to find work)incur a net loss of about $6,000 per worker per year. The turnaround from a surplus to a loss took hold in the early 1970's when outsourcing of US jobs and relocation of US plants to low wage regions beyond our shores accelerated. Numerous plants have shut down and workers fired who found any re-employment progressively more difficult. The actual unemployment rate in the USA today approaches 20% as those who have lost hope of finding any job grows in number and are excluded from the official unemployment statistics.
The net turnaround of more than $6,000 per US worker per year is equivalent to taking that same amount out of each workers annual pay check plus the real depreciation in value of the median pay. The total loss in real purchasing power for the typical two worker family is at least $15,000 to 25,000 annually. The loss is equivalent to the amount paid two workers, plus corporate profits that entirely benefit US corporations that are responsible for outsourcing and plant relocation's to low-labor cost foreign countries. Additionally these corporation avoid paying taxes on sales of foreign made products in plants operated by US corporations that ship the products back to the US for sale. American consumers buy foreign made goods and services that drive down their own wages without realizing the downside that has been created by allowing corporations to control trade policy by paying for political campaigns of their beholden politicians. The politicians in turn turn a deaf ear to the necessity of taxing corporations that profit from the use of low cost labor in other parts of the world.
Another way of measuring the magnitude of the problem is to divide the present total annual merchandise deficit of about $800 billion annually by the median wage of a worker in the USA today. The result is the approximate number of jobs that this deficit would generate if US median pay labor were doing the work instead of outsourced workers. The number of jobs that would be generated is a staggering 22 million. In other words, if our merchandise trade deficit was the same as in 1960, more than 20 million of us would be able to obtain jobs at the median pay of $22,000 annually. Unemployment could fall to near zero.
Neither major political party, it seem to me, is willing or completely able to comprehend and tell the public the full truth and scope of our economic problems caused by our self made trade deficit, and to enact all necessary trade sanctions and taxation to help restore American jobs. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party seems to recognize and acknowledge the real problem of our ballooning trade deficit, and seems much more willing to take actions against corporations that are typically indifferent to American workers, and who continue to outsource jobs.
The Democratic party must retain Congress for our workers to have any chance to improve their economic conditions. Turning around the 50 year deterioration of the economic status of American workers cannot occur quickly. The damage done over the last half century is far too severe to respond to any quick fixes. It is without question, however, that the Democrat Party and the Obama administration offer the only chance to do anything that will help the American workers out of this long developing economic decline. The choice is ours and the outcome will be all of ours. Vote wisely. Vote for the workers of our country. Vote for all Democratic Congressional candidates and give the workers in our country a chance to improve their own and their families well being.
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