Unemployment would then be the lowest ever for any president seeking re-election — lower than it was for Richard Nixon in November 1972 (5.3 percent) or for Bill Clinton in November 1996 (5.4 percent).
If Sen. John Kerry had hoped to make a big political issue out of an unemployment rate that is likely to be below 5 percent by election time, he had better start trying to change the subject as soon as possible. And his never-ending wisecracks about Herbert Hoover could backfire, too, because Hoover enacted the same policies key Democrats now recommend — namely, higher tax rates and tariffs.
Another nonissue sure to grow tiresome in a few more months is the maniacal anxiety about imports of business services — a trivial pursuit that would have gotten no attention at all had it not been deviously mislabeled as “outsourcing.”
That is not what outsourcing means. Outsourcing means having business services done by specialist firms rather than inside a manufacturing or financial firm.
When I was a vice president at a Chicago bank, we had an entire floor of attorneys and a few dozen economists on the payroll. The bank could have got better service for less money by putting legal firms and economic consultants on retainer. It often makes sense to also let specialist firms handle accounting, employee benefits and payroll. That is outsourcing.
What uninformed politicians and journalists mean by “outsourcing” is importing services. They would have you believe the United States has suddenly been importing many more services. Yet the increase in service imports last year was precisely zero.
From 1997 to 2000, by contrast, U.S. service imports grew 9.7 percent a year. So why did the media start fussing about imported services only after such imports stopped growing? Politics aside, this makes no more sense. Outsourcing is a senseless name for nonsense.
U.S. imports of both goods and services grew by 10½ percent a year from 1992 to 2000 in real terms, but by only 1½ percent a year from 2000 to 2003. Nobody complained about losing jobs to imports while imports grew rapidly. The pretense that Americans are losing jobs to imports did not gain political traction until imports stagnated. Turning facts on their head is, of course, a familiar symptom of election-year mania.
Trade warriors have been staring down the wrong side of their cannons — imports, rather than exports. Imports have been weak for three years, but exports have been even weaker. That matters because the United States is by far the world’s largest exporter of goods — China ranks fifth.
U.S. merchandise exports rose 6 percent a year from 1990 to 2001, while exports from Europe grew only 4 percent a year and exports from Japan by 3 percent. The United States is the world’s largest exporter of services by an even wider margin — India ranks 21st. Like China, India’s imports of commercial services have doubled since 1995. Although India did achieve a tiny surplus in services in the past two years, the country has a sizable overall trade deficit.
By fourth-quarter 2003, real U.S. exports of services were 5.2 percent higher than a year before. That is, the United States was exporting more “outsourcing” services, though service imports were flat. Real exports of goods were 7.2 percent higher. But those gains were still not enough to get exports back to pre-global recession levels. Real U.S. exports in 2003 were still 0.6 percent smaller than in 2000.
Here is the problem: Just as U.S. imports grow only when the U.S. economy grows (and shrink only in recessions), other countries’ imports also grow only if and when their economies grow. Strong economies, including ours, need more industrial imports and can afford to buy them. Unfortunately, economies of our biggest trading partners have not been strong.
Canada accounted for 23.8 percent of U.S. exports last year, Mexico for 13.7 percent, Germany and France 6.4 percent, and other members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (mainly in Europe) for 17.6 percent. If these economies don’t grow, neither can U.S. exports.
By fourth-quarter 2003, real GDP in the United States was 4.3 percent above a year earlier, compared with only 1 percent in Canada and 2 percent in Mexico. GDP was up a pathetic 0.2 percent in Germany and 0.5 percent in France — two countries with unemployment close to 10 percent. When your biggest customers are broke, it is not easy to sell them more.
Blame Europe and Canada’s weakness for relatively weak U.S. exports, not China’s strength (which is helping Japan). As the year-end 2003 report from the U.S. trade representative noted, “Over the last three years, while U.S. exports to the rest of the world have decreased by 10 percent, U.S. exports to China have increased by 66 percent.”
The United States would benefit greatly if there were more strong economies in the world, such as China and India, and fewer laggards like Germany, France and Canada. The latter countries could learn something from China and India, both of which prospered only after doing the opposite of what Herbert Hoover did in 1930–32 and what the Democratic Party now threatens to repeat.
The economies of China and India grew by drastically reducing tariffs and tax rates. China’s average tariff on imports has fallen from well more than 50 percent in the early 1980s to about 10 percent now. But actual tariff collections average less than 3 percent because so many goods are tariff-free. India slashed tariffs, too, and cut the top income tax rate from 62 percent in 1984 to 30 percent today, becoming just another in a long list of supply-side miracles. Politicians who now propose the U.S. do the opposite of what China and India have done, and instead move closer to emulating Sweden and France, are amazingly slow learners.
