Lost jobs cannot be ignored

A thousand jobs here, a thousand jobs there, and pretty soon you're talking about real trouble.
Western Pennsylvania is losing nearly 1,000 jobs at Sony's Westmoreland County television plant. Where are the jobs going? To Mexico.
The Associated Press reported that the Sony Technology Center-Pittsburgh, as the former Volkswagen plant is now known, would lay off as many as 900 workers this year, or about 75 percent of its work force. It is shifting production from rear-projection televisions to liquid-crystal display models.
Production of flat-screen, 46-inch Bravia LCD sets will require a far smaller work force. The labor-intensive rear-projection sets will be built in Tijuana.
The only good news is that a few hundred jobs on the LCD line, a chemicals facility and a customer service center will be saved at the Sony plant.
Real money, too
The first paragraph was a paraphrase of a comment by Everett Dirksen, the senator from Illinois who died in 1969: "A billion here, a billion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money."
And, indeed, the loss of jobs in the United States and the shifting of that work to other countries involves real money. The U.S. trade deficit surged to a record high of 764 billion last year.
Mexico is already fifth highest in exporting more to the United States than it imports, behind China, Japan, Canada and Germany, in that order.
China is the largest beneficiary of what is becoming a dysfunctional trade policy. See the column on the page opposite this one, which discusses some of the ramifications of the trade imbalance with China.
But the loss of hundreds of jobs in New Stanton, Pa., is a symptom of the trade imbalances that are emerging from the NAFTA agreement, which had bipartisan support (and the endorsement of this page) because it was supposed to be a win-win for the United States, Mexico and Canada.
Growing trade deficits and the continuing loss of good jobs are not good for the United States. Made in America is becoming a vanishing label. That's a problem that should be getting more attention in Washington, D.C., than it is.