Trade Imbalance

Trade Imbalance

Daryl Robison

Pols 385 American Politics

October 7, 2013

The trade imbalance between the US and other nations, such as China, is alarming. With globalization and the growth of transnational corporations the problem has grown worse. Manufacturing and service industry jobs have been outsourced to countries on the opposite side of the globe in order for corporations to secure more profit. My lego figure represents foreign nations taking advantage of working class Americans through unfair trade practices. The dragons represents those Asian countries and the person being eaten represents working class people.

Transnational corporations have no loyalty to any country; their only concern is constantly increasing their profits. This has led to the rise of more goods being imported to the US from other countries where labor is much cheaper. In the service industry customer service jobs have been outsourced to countries like India.

Since the 1976 to 2008 the amount of foreign owned US assets have increased dramatically. Foreign owned US assets rose from $291,590,000 in 1976 to $23,357,404,000 in 2008. In contrast US owned foreign assets rose from $456,964,000 in 1976 to $19,888,158,000 in 2008. “Recently, American companies and consumers have purchased $600 billion more goods and services produced abroad each year than US firms have exported to other countries.” (Katznelson, Kesselman, Draper 2011, p. 363) This shows the increasing trade disparity between the US and other countries.

The problem of trade imbalance and high unemployment in the US can be solved. Tariffs could be implemented to imported goods, thus creating greater incentive for corporations to invest in the US and by developing new trade policies that support balanced and sustainable international trade. It does not make sense to have our goods imported from halfway around the world or to call a customer service agent in India when Americans need jobs at home.

Bibliography

Ira Katznelson, Mark Kesselman, and Alan Draper

“The Politics of Power”