http://www.amconmag.com/2005_05_09/buchanan.html



May 9, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative

CAFTA: Last Nail in the Coffin?

by Patrick J. Buchanan


With U.S. prisons filling up with aliens, 10 million illegals here and counting, Californians fleeing east, savage Salvadorian gangs battling with machetes inside the Beltway, and Minutemen headed for the Arizona border, Rip Van Republican has awakened to the threat of open borders. Meanwhile, the White House dozes on.

But just as the chickens are coming home to roost on the Bush failure to defend America’s frontier, so they will soon be coming home on Bush’s embrace of free-trade fanaticism.

As I write, the Department of Commerce has just released the trade deficit numbers for February. Again, the monthly trade deficit set a record, $61 billion. In January-February 2005, the annual U.S. trade deficit was running $100 billion above the all-time record of $617 billion in 2004.


In the mail this week came the annual graphs and tables from Charles McMillion of MBG Information Services, who has patiently chronicled the decline and fall of the once-awesome U.S. industrial machine. Since 1992, when some of us urged the president’s father not to grant MFN to China, the returns are these:

Between 1993 and 2004, the U.S. trade deficit with Beijing grew 700 percent to $162 billion.


In the last decade, China’s total trade surplus at U.S. expense was $805 billion.


China’s leading exports to us, which account for almost half her $162 billion trade surplus, came from shipments of computers, electrical machinery, and parts.


Leading U.S. exports to China (Boeing alone excepted) were, in ascending order: meat, meat offal, fibers, ore, slag, ash, organic chemicals, fertilizers, copper, cereals, raw hides, skins, pulp of wood, cotton, and the big sellerâ€â€