Making free trade more fair

[OhioChick]

WASHINGTON - Within the past year, an important new debate has taken shape, though it's not likely to be the focus of any forthcoming presidential debates as such. It is likely, however, to distinguish liberal from centrist thinking for decades to come.

The debate begins at the familiar flash point of trade - more particularly, with the realization of business elites and their political champions that the nation's free-trade policies have become threatened by growing public anxiety over our economic future. While corporate profits soar, individual wages stagnate, held at least partly in check by the brave new fact of offshoring - that millions of Americans' jobs can be performed at a fraction of the cost in developing nations near and far. November's elections, in which voters sent to Congress a freshman class composed almost entirely of free-trade skeptics, rang alarm bells on both Wall Street and K Street.

In reaction not just to November but to reams of economic data showing that the U.S. median income has flat-lined, such longtime champions of free-trade orthodoxy as former Clinton Treasury secretary Robert Rubin have changed their tune. Maintaining and extending our trade agreements is still their holy writ, but to compensate for whatever leveling effect trade may have on Americans' incomes, they now call for wage insurance to help workers who've been compelled to take lower-paying jobs than the ones they lost. As call centers relocate to India, the Rubinauts call for extending trade adjustment assistance to service as well as manufacturing workers. They call for a universal health-care system delinking insurance from employment, so that U.S. companies can compete globally without having to be the only corporations in an advanced economy that cover their workers' medical costs. They call for improving our education system so that American workers can be more competitive.

http://news.cincypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070223/EDIT/702230302/1003