Candidates lack candor on the economy

By TOM WALSH

I would be a lot more worked up about getting Michigan and Florida delegates seated at the Democratic National Convention this summer if we were hearing a coherent economic policy from either of the two remaining candidates.

Instead of a clear vision for how the United States can compete in the global economy of today and tomorrow, however, U.S. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are selling voters a big lie, especially in struggling industrial states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The big lie goes like this:

We can turn back the clock, good people, to a time when high-paying factory jobs were plentiful.

A time when workers without college degrees still could have a nice home, a couple new cars, a boat and a place Up North.

A time when Big Labor and Big Business would jaw for a while about how to divvy up the Big Profits of the American auto giants, steelmakers and airlines that ruled the world, and then promise comfy pensions and health care for life to all.

We can turn back the clock.

All we have to do is scrap or renegotiate those awful free trade agreements, especially that nasty North American Free Trade Agreement that allows greedy companies to ship our good jobs off to other countries.

Obama and Clinton tried hard to out-anti-NAFTA one another in the recent Ohio primary, but the rhetoric was empty if not dishonest.

Double-talk

Obama himself got tripped up on the duplicity, when word leaked that one of his aides had quietly reassured a Canadian diplomat that President Obama wouldn’t really backtrack on NAFTA, that his words were only campaign rhetoric.

Clinton, in a Detroit campaign stop Wednesday to push a do-over of the Michigan primary, cast us poor Michiganders as victims of “unfair trade policies,” even though NAFTA was passed in 1994 thanks to strong support from her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, and a memorable debate triumph by then-Vice President Al Gore over NAFTA opponent H. Ross Perot.

The reality of NAFTA is that total trade, productivity and incomes rose smartly in each NAFTA nation in the decade after the treaty was signed. And while it is undeniably true that some Michigan factory jobs are disappearing because products are imported from nations with lower labor costs, we cannot bring them back by pretending that Russia is communist, China is a closed market and India is a British colony.

Job dislocation always has been part of the U.S. economic journey, as farmhands, cotton-pickers and television factories gave way to new technology or lower costs abroad.

Indeed, Trade Adjustment Assistance — training and payments provided to workers who lose jobs as a direct result of import competition — wasn’t invented as a response to NAFTA. It’s been around since the Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

Don’t take this argument as merely a rant against Democrats. Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, looks to have an economic plan disturbingly similar to the incumbent president’s — tax cuts, heavy spending on the Iraq war, equally huge budget deficits — but that’s another column.

Let’s push all the candidates to get real about training our workers to excel in a changing world.

X Tom Walsh is a business columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.