SUCKING SOUND
Job-losing recovery vexes a nation and its president

From the Houston Chronicle editorial board:

In his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, Texas billionaire Ross Perot used to say that lowering trade barriers would result in "a giant sucking sound" made by American jobs heading south. He was partially correct. Many jobs were lost to Mexico, although the increased trade created many in the United States.

The problem today is that jobs in the United States, Mexico and other manufacturing countries are headed to China. The job losses result not from NAFTA, but from China's low wages that in some cases transcend mere exploitation and approximate the conditions of slave labor.

President Bush, who traveled to Kansas City, Mo., last week to defend his economic policy, has an additional problem. The economy seems to be rebounding, as he predicted, but the United States is shedding jobs, particularly those that used to come with a good salary, at an accelerating pace.

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While musing on the "job loss" recovery, myself, at around the same time that the Chronicle was doing it, I made a very similar observation. I guess that the phrase "sucking sound" is just too hard to resist when describing President Bush's economy...

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