Tom Piatak

September 05, 2008

John McCain’s acceptance speech was a vivid (well, maybe soporific) reminder that the problem with the GOP ticket is at the top, not the bottom.  Depsite McCain’s adopting the slogan “Country First” for his campaign, the economic portion of his speech could have been titled “Globalism First.”  McCain repeatedly told us that the demands of the “global economy” needed to be met, come what may.  What that means, in concrete terms, is more shuttered factories and stagnating wages, as American companies continue to offshore their operations to take advantage of lower costs overseas, secure in the knowledge that they can bring the services they’ve outsourced, or the goods they’ve made, back into the United States, without paying any sort of tariff.  I recently was browsing through a trucking industry publication, which featured an editorial admonishing American trucking companies that not enough of them have taken advantage of the opportunity to outsource accounting jobs and the like to India, and reporting that the fall of the dollar has made manufacturing in Mexico (for exporting goods into the United States) a more attractive option.  But not to worry, McCain tells us those accountants and factory workers losing out to India and Mexico can always go to the local community college and learn to do, well, something, at taxpayer expense.  Why the GOP wishes to subsidize the professoriat and continue to send overseas jobs that have actually supported Americans and sustained American communities is not an easy question to answer, and McCain would be well advised to let Sarah Palin do the talking when he brings his “Global Economy First” message to my home state of Ohio and other areas that used to be called the industrial Midwest.