Like it or not, folks, economy is driven by choices consumers make

By Daniel Howes
The Detroit News
August 20, 2004

The latest unemployment reports says Michigan lost another 25,000 jobs in July, two-thirds of them in manufacturing.

Faced with incontrovertible facts, President Bush nonetheless insists “there are good signs. The economy is strong. It’s getting stronger. We’re getting the job done, but there’s more that needs to be done.”

Faced with the same facts, Democratic challenger John Kerry blames the halting job recovery — which clearly is hitting Michigan harder than just about any other state — on failed Bush policies and irresponsible tax cuts.

What neither seems willing to utter is the most uncomfortable truism of this election: Most of the manufacturing jobs disappearing from Michigan and across the country are going because the global economy makes it possible and because American consumers, based on their daily purchase decisions, want it that way.

There’s almost nothing Bush or Kerry can do about it, either. Trade barriers invite trade wars (with Europe) and soaring domestic prices (ask the Japanese). Government subsidies are expensive and politically indefensible. Playing tough with the Chinese threatens diplomatic strife.

Telling the truth about the global economy is an option, of course — that previously closed markets are open, that China and India are each minting perhaps 10 times more engineers each year than we are, that much of the manufacturing moving offshore was endangered anyway.

But in the 24-7 media age where every political utterance gets clipped, parsed and analyzed, admitting that the most powerful politician in the world can’t do much to stem the economic tide is akin to saying, “Don’t vote for me.”

So Bush focuses on the positive numbers — the steady growth in gross domestic product, improving equity prices and rising consumer confidence — because the solution to the manufacturing drain is a long-term shift to retraining, more post-secondary education and different expectations on things like health-care.

Do you think a third-generation autoworker will vote for a guy who tells him that?

Kerry’s spiel, and those of his supporters across the state, suggests that we can go back again, that we can return to the days when the Arsenal of Democracy’s plants employed waves of workers barely out of high school and that we wouldn’t be in this position here in Detroit if it wasn’t for Bush Republicans.

If only ... Detroit’s automakers have been shedding workers for decades and are vastly more productive because of it. Twenty-five years ago, the United Auto Workers had 1.5 million dues-paying members; today, it has less than half that. GM, Ford and Chrysler will continue to make the same, if not more, cars and trucks with the fewer people regardless of their profitability.

That’s a fact.

Nostalgia for the golden age is a powerful thing in a town where the definition of a perfect summer weekend is cruising 40-year-old cars up and down Woodward Avenue. Reliving the old times won’t revive them.

Michigan is straddling fundamental economic change and we, like it or not, resemble our Olympic men’s basketball team. Everyone is playing our game, some of them very well. Denying that fact won’t change it, but meeting the challenge may.

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