Senator Obama campaigned in Oregon over the weekend.  He is favored to win in the state and his campaign has
asserted that an Oregon win will garner him the necessary number of pledged delegates to claim the Democratic party nomination.

Obama spoke at Vernier Software & Technology, an educational software company in Beaverton, Oregon, where he
held an economic discussion with voters.  Obama delivered his remarks on the economy, rightfully stressing that average Americans are feeling a lot of anxiety about their economic well-being.  The Senator said, “People are working harder for less. You’re paying more for gas, and gorceries, and tuition.  Millions of families are facing foreclosure. We’ve already lost hundreds of thousands of jobs this year.”

Obama talked a lot about the skewed tax insentives in our system that “reward wealth, and not work” and changing
the code to give working individual and families a break.  But he barely mentioned trade, except to say the obligatory:”We need to stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas.” Considering that this discussion was billed to be about the “key economic issues” the omission of trade, is troubling.  Majority of American voters now say that trade costs jobs and lowers wages.

Manufacturing is the number 2 contributor to Oregon’s economy, accounting for $27.2 billion of its GSP.  But the state
lost 22,600 manufacturing jobs from 2000-2007, and 25,700 jobs lost in all sectors in the same period of time can be
directly attribute to our trade deficit with China.

If Barack Obama is indeed more concerned about the success of Main Street, than Wall Street, as he is fond of
saying, he can’t omit trade from his discussions about how to fix our economy.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Manufacturing in the U.S., Economic Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.