BUYING INTO AMERICA:
How Foreign Money Is Changing the Face of Our Nation
Martin and Susan Tolchin
New York: Times Books, 1988
384 pp., $19.95
The Reagan years have spawned a genre of books and articles about our economy and national strength that might be called the "pay no attention" genre. Economists and pundits who confidently predicted that President Reagan's supply-side tax cuts would bring us permanent double-digit inflation, increase unemployment, and precipitate an economic collapse must now begin their books and articles by insisting that we "pay no attention" to the fifteen million jobs created since the tax cuts took effect. We are to turn our eyes from the fact that inflation has fallen from the back-to-back years of double-digit inflation (13.5 percent in 1979, 12.5 percent in 1980) to below 4 percent. We are urged to ignore the increase in our standard of living, the growth in productivity, and the lower interest rates.
Funny, but when Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976 he and the Establishment press demanded that we focus our attention on the "misery index," the sum of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate. That figure, we were told, was the true measure of the economy and its strength. Well, the misery index is now fading from view, as the Reagan tax cuts and deregulation efforts have dropped the index by more than half.
In the genre
Buying into America by Martin Tolchin, a reporter for the New York Times, and his wife, Susan Tolchin, a professor at George Washington University, is the most recent, but certainly not the last, of this genre.
The writers deny, ignore, or play down the tremendous economic growth that followed the full implementation of the 1981 tax cuts--a period of economic growth that is the longest peacetime expansion in the history of the United States. There is no peeking at reality in this 384-page requiem for the American economy.
Instead, the Tolchins employ a magician's traditional misdirection and would have us focus on what they claim is a massive inflow of foreign capital into the United States that is sapping our economic strength, stripping us of our independence, making America the world's colony, and revealing--despite all evidence to the contrary--the true weakness of the economy that has created more jobs in the last few months than the entire European Economic Community has created in the past dozen years.
The Tolchins' assertion that foreign money is "buying up America" is part of the recent focus by liberal economists on the fact that foreigners are now investing more money in the United States than the United States is investing abroad. Television anchormen and liberal politicians are trumpeting this, and moaning that America is now a "debtor nation," equating our position with that of Brazil and Mexico.
The book and its thesis--foreign investment is increasing; foreign investment is bad; foreign investment threatens America's future--reminds one of the critic who told
...
Read Full Article
|
