The Betrayal of the American Dream Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jobs : Ever since jobs began to be exported from the United States, the elite have sought to assure Americans that the number was small and would not have a significant effect on overall employment. In 2007 Jacob Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics contended that concerns over offshoring had been “vastly overblown” and that only about 4 percent of those who had been laid off had lost their jobs because work was shipped offshore.
    Financial writers picked up on the study to echo that theme. In a May 16, 2007, column, Robert J. Samuelson thundered: “Remember the great ‘offshoring’ debate? . . . Merciless multinational companies would find the cheapest labor and to heck with all the lives ruined in the process. What happened? Well, not much.” Samuelson cited Kirkegaard in contending that offshoring was no big deal.
    But offshoring is a huge deal. Samuelson, like other media cheerleaders, failed to take into account the trends already under way when he dismissed warnings about it. Although the U.S. Department of Labor does not have definitive statistics on the number of jobs sent offshore each year, a little-noticed report by the agency’s economists in 2008 concluded that 160 service occupations employing 30 million Americans—more than 25 percent of the entire service industry workforce—were “susceptible to off shoring.”
    If the past is a guide, any job that can be offshored will be. An analysis by Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder, using 2004 data to measure potential job losses in both the manufacturing and service industries, concluded that 291 occupations accounting for 38 million jobs—29 percent of the workforce—could be offshored.

    RIGGING THE SYSTEM
    For what has happened to jobs, retirement savings, and other vital signs of America’s economic health, you can thank Congress and a succession of presidents who make the rules for the American economy. These rules determine the kind of job you may have, how much you will pay in taxes, and whether you have health benefits or a pension.
    Congress makes the rules when it enacts new laws and amends or rescinds others—and then votes on whether or not to provide the resources that determine whether the laws will be enforced.
    The president makes the rules through the departments and agencies that implement new regulations and amend or rescind others—and then either enforce or ignore these regulations.
    Both the Congress and the president make the rules when they succumb to pressure from special interests and fail to enact laws or implement regulations that would level the economic playing field for everyone.
    Taken together, the myriad laws and federal regulations form a set of rules that govern the way business operates—from trade to taxes, from regulatory oversight to bankruptcy, from health care to pensions, from corporate write-offs to investment practices.
    In every era, these rules establish a system of rewards and penalties that influence business behavior, which in turn has a wide-ranging impact on your daily life:
• From the price you pay for a gallon of gasoline or a quart of milk to the elimination of your job
• From the cost of your favorite cereal to the size of your unemployment check if you’ve been laid off
• From whether the company you work for expands in the United States or shifts your job to Mexico
• From the size of your pension to the question of whether you will even have a pension
    Ultimately, the rule-makers in Washington determine who, among the principal players in the U.S. economy, is most favored, who is simply ignored, and who is penalized. In the last few decades, the rules have been nearly universally weighted against working Americans.
    That a huge wealth gap exists in this country is now so widely recognized and accepted as fact that most people have lost track of how it happened. One of the purposes of this book is to show how the gap became so huge and to explain