The New York Times is out of ideas:

In an editorial, Wanted: Leadership on Jobs, the New York Times has virtually nothing to say about creating private sector jobs except for this:

If successful, ambitious goals like health care reform and energy legislation may generate jobs ...

Yet adds

... but officials have not persuasively linked them to job growth.

The Times notes:

Economic recovery will not automatically replace the jobs that have been lost so far in this recession. Nor will higher levels of learning and skill — necessary as they are — magically create jobs, especially in the numbers that are needed.

How did those jobs get lost? Some of it was due to free trade, a policy the Times promotes. As in a recent editorial opposing tariffs on tires made in China:

... the additional duties are unlikely to give [workers] lasting relief. In a globalized economy, raising tariffs cannot long protect uncompetitive businesses.

Hey, guess what? As long as we trade with a China that pays its workers very little in wages, all manufacturing jobs in the U.S. will be "uncompetitive", which is just fine for the Times, requiring no action at all (like tariffs).

Global free trade with countries that employ low-wage labor is a job killer in developed countries. The Times prefers not to notice that fact.

In that (latter cited) editorial, there was this gem:

Like all American workers, these workers can best be helped by regenerating growth at home and abroad. Protectionist remedies, even legal ones like this, impede that growth without providing long-term replacements for vulnerable, trade-threatened jobs.

Okay, New York Times, what are the long-term replacements for such jobs? What are they? Give us a list.


posted by Quiddity at 10/03/2009 10:42:00 PM