Big Macs And TheU.S. Trade Crisis @ By Alan Tonelson (NAPSA)—Does the United States buy too much from other countries and sell too little in return, sending too many good jobs abroad and amassing too muchforeign debt? Supporters of giveaway, NAFTA-style trade deals have a ready answer: Don’t limit imports. Just export more—especially since about 95 percent of the world’s population lives outside the United States. But a new report by the Swiss investment bank UBS provides a welcome reality check for these import expectations. And the key is the global price of Tonelson a Big Mac. UBS researchers investigated how long it would take the typical worker in various cities to earn enough to buy a Big Mac. The results make painfully clear that most other countries lack the purchasing power even to move the needle on U.S. exports. For example, the typical New York worker needs only 12 minutes to be able to afford a Big Mac. His counterparts in Los Angeles and Chicago need only 10, as do residents of Tokyo. Typical West European workers need a few minutes more. Most of the planet, however, lives in poor third world countries, and these countries dominate America’s current market-opening trade agenda. Yet the typical worker in Mexico City must work 75 minutes to earn his Big Mac. In Bogota, Colombia, the figure is more than an hour and a half, and in Bombay, India, it is nearly two hours. Workers in Nairobi, Kenya, have the toughest struggle. They must work more than three hours to buy a single Big Mac. If so much of the world must work so long to afford a single hamburger (which areall locally made), how can they afford the costlier manufactured products exported by the United States? The answer: “They can’t.” Washington should promote exports where possible. But our trade crisis and its threat to U.S. industry and long-term national prosperity can’t be eliminated without bringing imports under control. Mr. Toneison is a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council Educational Foundation, a Washington research organization, and author of the recent globalization study, The Race to the Bottom.
