Somewhere over the rainbow

A quote by President Bush from yesterday’s press conference with Silvio Berlusconi: “There's a trade deficit. That's easy to resolve; people can buy more United States products if they're worried about the trade deficit.”

But, the question is why are people not buying more US products? It’s become a different economic world and, instead of trying to understand why we have a trade deficit, the President tosses it off as being something easy to resolve. If it were so easy, why will we import more food than we export this year? Why is Brazil the leading exporter of beef? Why do we compete with Russian wheat growers when a few years ago we were supplying wheat to Russia to avert a famine? How many Japanese cars are among the top sellers in this country? If it were so easy to resolve the trade deficit, why hasn’t it been done?

The President mentioned our two other deficits: short term and long term. He said zero about the short term deficit although, if the first two months of the year are indicative of the whole year, we’ll wind up with a short term deficit 50% higher than the record we set last year. He’ll fix the long term deficit by privatizing social security. What about Medicare, which may be in worse trouble than social security?

Was it Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz who said, “I wish I may. I wish I may,,,,, I wish I may.”? It’s too bad that we’re not in a fictitious Kansas any more.