The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein is disgusted because the Bush Administration's "program to rescue the American manufacturing sector":
washingtonpost.com: A Feeble Plan To Save U.S. Manufacturing: After a dozen town meetings, a road trip by three Cabinet officers, months of study and countless meetings of assistant secretaries, the Bush administration has finally brought forth its program to rescue the American manufacturing sector. And it's a bad joke, a melange of tired ideas, empty promises and ideological slogans, and an embarrassment for the White House economic team.
The policy was unveiled in a much-anticipated speech to the Detroit Economic Club by Commerce Secretary Don Evans. Instead of offering his knowledgeable audience a cogent, thoughtful analysis of the problems facing manufacturers, Evans trotted out old Rotary Club canards about high taxes, oppressive regulation and frivolous lawsuits.
While correctly identifying runaway health insurance costs as a problem, he failed to come up with even one serious remedy.
And although Evans grabbed headlines with tough talk about China, the only action to back it up -- hold on to your hat now -- was a new Unfair Trade Practices Team at Commerce to "track, detect and confront unfair competition," as if there weren't already several hundred bureaucrats doing just that.
Perhaps most laughable was Evans's boast that George W. Bush had single-handedly revived the free-trade agenda -- conveniently forgetting that President Bill Clinton expended enormous political capital to push through NAFTA and China's accession to the WTO, ignoring as well the inconvenient fact that his own administration had just sold out American manufacturers at trade talks in Cancun to protect subsidized beet farmers and cotton growers....
It is possible to make the case for such an aggressive [manufacturing-supporting] industrial policy. It is also possible to make a case for doing nothing. But the Bush administration has come up with the worst of both worlds -- doing nothing while pretending otherwise and hoping nobody notices until after the next election.
His article, however, lacks context. Of course the Bush Administration lies about the likely effects of its economic policies--that's what they do, in things as important as the implication of tax cuts for the long-run fiscal stability of the country and in things as trivial as the claim that the Bush Administration plans to create a new (rather than simply changing the title of an old) Assistant Secretary of Commerce.
The story would have been stronger had it contained even one paragraph noting that this particular public-relations exercise is nothing unusual: that it is Bush Administration standard operating procedure.
Posted by DeLong at September 19, 2003 07:08 AM | TrackBack
"It is possible to make the case for such an aggressive [manufacturing-supporting] industrial policy. It is also possible to make a case for doing nothing. "
Bwah! Like with eight Democratic presidential candidates pounding on "more jobs lost in manufacturing since the Depression!" it's possible for the Bushies to say their policy is to do nothing. ;-)
And as if the DeLong/Krugman axis would endorse "aggressive industrial policy", like Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer's just proposed tariffs on China. Sure. ;-)
"But the Bush administration has come up with the worst of both worlds -- doing nothing while pretending otherwise and hoping nobody notices until after the next election. "
You mean, they are making gestures to deflate political pressures to enact destructive industrial policy -- pressures being stoked up by the Democrats.
It's called politics 101. Some political group gets hot over implementing some bad idea, so you make some gestures to pacify them without actually having to implement the bad idea. That't not a bad thing to do, it's a *good* thing to do.
BTW, it's quite a surprise to me that someone who served in a prior administration -- *any* prior administration, but particlularly one that was especially well noted for its own political slipperyness -- can't recall two or three dozen times (if not hundreds) when they did the same thing.
"The story would have been stronger had it contained even one paragraph noting that this particular public-relations exercise is nothing unusual: that it is Bush Administration standard operating procedure."
As well as being SOP for the Administrations of Clinton, Bush I, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, LBJ, Kennedy ... Jefferson, Washington, George III... And around here Pataki, Cuomo ...
Hey, I suppose it's OK to profess shock at discovering politics in politics if one wants to claim the pure moral high ground for oneself. But one slips off that high ground pretty quickly when one that insists that politics exists only one political party's politics.
And as we are so much insisting on *political honesty* these days, perhaps Profs DeLong, Krugman, Blinder, the good folks at CBPP et. al., and their friends of superior-political-honesty will soon start a letter and op-ed writing campaign targeted at the Democratic presidential candidates correcting them and explaining how the "job loss issue in manufacturing" is *bogus* where China is concerned, and generally as well?
You know, explaining how when one job is lost another is created, as previously stated here at this site; and how decline in manufacturing is secular like it was in agriculture; and how as Prof Krugman once wrote (when a Democrat was in office)...
"The obvious (to me) point is that the average unemployment rate over the next 10 years will be what the Fed wants it to be, regardless of the U.S.-Mexico trade balance..." Substitute China.
Shouldn't those with superior political honesty be publicly correcting their own side's candidates and Schumers on these points? So their own side's politics will be honest??
Or perhaps superior political honesty consists these days of enjoying having one's own side stoke up what you know are bogus complaints and pressures for bad policy -- and then, when the other side that actually has the responsibility to fend off such bad policy responds, crying "shame, shame, you dishonest weasels".
Well, that's politics, eh?
Jim- you dismiss everything as politics as usual. Forgetting politics and your personal attachments, was NAFTA a good idea?
Do you agree with Bartlett that the steel tariffs were a bad idea?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31768-2003Sep18.html
What effect good or bad is the policy of this administration having on manufacturing.
I know that many steel manufacturers (some of whom were in the audience) are royally pissed off about the steel tariffs. Rightly or wrongly, they feel that they are losing business to overseas manufacturers that have access to cheaper steel inputs. They feel the steel tariffs put them at a disadvantage.
Given the health care costs are a huge problem for the manufacturing industry and other sectors, what has this adminsistration actually done to address cost issues? or cost to employers?
How has this administration addressed workforce training needs for the increasingly computerized/robotics mfg sector?
Do you believe the government can have no positive effect on the manufacturing climate other than keeping taxes low? There are a lot of manufacturers that would disagree.
Posted by: bakho on September 19, 2003 11:08 AMJim, we have an industrial policy already. It's inchoate and political, but we have one: it's a spectacularly bloated defense budget, and the WH will do whatever it takes to inflate that defense budget.
Now, you generally favor the ideology of the present WH. At least, you certainly become indignant if anyone criticizes it. So my question is, why doesn't the GOP--so confident of its superior vision--turn to that, rather than "destructive industrial policy"? Why must they offer a "lite" version of what the Dem presidential candidates ares proposing? Why have a think tank which does nothing but deliver gutted versions of Democrat proposals, rather than conservative alternatives?
Finally, there's a big difference between the degree of mendacity of this administration and others. This one lies very compulsively about its core plans, goals and methods. Others sometimes lied about methods, and got attacked for doing so--including, I might add, by members of their own party. (Not that it makes any difference). And there is a stunning intolerence on the part of this administration to any sort of criticism.
I respectfully submit this as a resentative example of how the administration views the concerns the "other side."
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0919patriot19.html
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Look, if I were president I'd expect you to disagree with nearly everything I did. But I sure as hell would make allowances for your criticisms, consider the things you objected to most, and seek to mitigate those. Could anything be more remote from the actions of this administration? Even mild critics are treated as outright traitors (see Christine Amanpour).