America is deep in a jobs crisis. The unemployment rate is stuck around 9 percent nationally, with states such as Florida, Nevada and South Carolina in double digits. Real wages for educated workers are still plunging, while new college graduates are squeezed between rising student loans and the toughest labor market in recent memory.
Against this backdrop, the global economy looms large as both threat and promise. There’s a justifiable fear that America has lost its competitiveness, that our jobs are being siphoned to China and India, that the wages of our young people are being depressed by a global education glut. At the same time, the rapidly growing markets of the developing world could be a potent target for U.S. exports of goods, services, and intellectual capital, creating good jobs here.
In this global economy, we need to know which industries are internationally competitive, which ones aren’t, and whether the gaps are closing or widening. Unfortunately, the reality is this data currently does not exist. And what we don’t know hurts us, because it prevents us from pursuing effective strategies for boosting US jobs.
Although the government collects reams of economic data, it doesn’t measure what’s most vital to our ability to reverse America’s jobs decline: how our goods and services stack up against those of China and other competitors in terms of price.
You can’t fix what you can’t measure. We need a new national jobs strategy that begins with an accurate way of measuring America’s competitive prowess, on an industry-by-industry basis.
This policy brief proposes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics undertake a “Competitiveness Audit.” The Competitiveness Audit will compare the price of selected imports with the comparable domestically produced goods and services. That will tell us the size of the ‘price gap’ between imports and domestic production.
Last week 
A rift seems to have opened between the Obama administration and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on the ever-sensitive topic of North Korea. Sen. Kerry convened a hearing today on the subject, and previewed 
Many of the facts relating to the globalization of intellectual property (IP) theft over the last decade are not debatable. For example, IP theft has decreased the market share of U.S. firms and destroyed or prevented the creation of millions of U.S. jobs. While currently 18 million Americas are employed in IP-intensive industries, the U.S. economy loses over $20 billion annually to IP theft and in 2007 IP theft reduced global trade by 5 to 7 percent.
The short summary: The Chinese policy of buying dollars can be best understood as an indirect purchase of U.S. knowledge capital–technology and business know-how. That, in a nutshell, is why we feel poorer today. Unless the Obama Administration understands the link between the undervalued yuan and the global flows of knowledge capital, negotiations with China are doomed to fail.
Maybe it’s just the growing pains of an adolescent superpower, but China has begun to flex its newfound muscles in ways inconsistent with its “peaceful rise.” Its bullying behavior demands a firm pushback from the United States – starting next month when Chinese President Hu Jintao comes to Washington for talks with President Obama.
