DAN K. THOMASSON There's no quick fix to trade problems

WASHINGTON -- That giant sucking sound that Ross Perot warned about in the debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement has developed into a roar as the engine of globalization has gotten louder and louder, threatening to drown out most voices of reason in the next presidential election.
Even those of us who are woefully untutored in the complexities of modern economics are bright enough to understand that there is no quick solution to America's job loss crisis and any politician who says otherwise is an outright liar.
But in case a candidate does profess a fix short of debilitating protectionism, voters should demand that he reveal it immediately, and then elect or reelect him without opposition. That goes for the current occupant of the White House who seems as mystified as the rest of us but was wisely advised to reverse a wholly unrealistic forecast of more than 3 million new jobs.
Certainly the two remaining viable candidates for the Democratic nomination don't appear to have the answer either. Nor does quadrennial presidential independent candidate Ralph Nader, who thinks all corporations are evil. But all are primed to make the issue of jobs the central theme of their campaigns against George W. Bush, a difficult task given the positive state of the rest of the economy.
Expensive hands
Balancing a check book is about as much as any of us understand about basic economics -- that and the fact that the things we like to buy for much less at places like Wal-Mart generally don't come from the hands of American workers largely because those hands have become too expensive for the nation's manufacturers. These producers, citing their fiduciary responsibilities, are looking south to Mexico and beyond and east, all the way to China, for the kind of low, fringeless wages that make shareholders as happy as consumers who enjoy the benefits of globalization while condemning it.
Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic front-runner and former defender of free trade, and his last real opponent, Sen. John Edwards, both propose using the tax code as incentive for stopping the outsourcing of everything from heavy manufacturing to tax preparation. There isn't much question that corporations these days are searching for a friendlier tax atmosphere than here and have found it all over the world.
But that sure isn't the real driving force behind job losses. When U.S. workers are asking wages and fringes from five to 10 times more than those in other countries, the lure is overwhelming.
The southern migration of jobs is nothing new. After the Civil War, the textile and shoe industries that made so much of New England prosperous began moving closer to the source of cotton and cheap labor, eventually leaving a trail of empty mills and manufacturing plants from Maine to Connecticut. Now the weaving has moved to Mexico and farther south and to China, cutting sharply into the workforce of the U.S. South.
The president's chief economic adviser, a well regarded practitioner of his science but woefully unskilled in politics, set off a recent fire storm by remarking that outsourcing of jobs was not all that bad in the interest of free trade, noting that things that once couldn't be bartered now can be. He said that ultimately this would benefit the American economy and create jobs. Well, so much for telling the truth (and most economists say that's what it is) during a presidential election year. Everybody from the Republican speaker of the House to the cloakroom attendant in the Senate condemned him, some even demanding he be guillotined or at least fired.
Political realities
There are economic realities and political realities. Nearly every indicator with the exception of jobs points to major economic recovery, and employment usually lags behind in such cases. Try to explain that, however, to a worker who is unemployed or afraid of being so in Ohio or Michigan or elsewhere in the Rust Belt. He is vulnerable to the protectionists who would risk economic chaos by building trade barriers on everything imaginable.
What is needed is patience and small steps and continued free trade and retraining and some tax restructuring and even a reassessment of the wages certain work is worth. What we are likely to get is election year demagoguery that will give false hope and set the whole process back even further.
X Thomasson is former editor of the Scripps Howard .