Word: smokestacks
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Sadly, what makes this growth rate seem impressive is the economic difficulties of less affluent black workers. Beginning in the early 1970s, blacks disproportionately bore the brunt of the decline of smokestack America. Since then, not only has there been a widening gap between black and white unemployment rates, but the real incomes of some categories of low-skill black workers have plummeted 20% as well. Small wonder that blacks' per capita income was 57% of whites' in 1984, the same percentage as in 1971. So much for the Reagan-era vision of Morning in America...
...next important test will be the Administration's position on proposed revisions of the Clean Air Act, which the White House has promised to announce by the end of this month. Environmentalists want Bush to back, among other things, tough new limits on smokestack emissions of sulfur dioxide, a major cause of acid rain. But that could cause a political backlash in states that produce high-sulfur coal, such as Illinois and Pennsylvania. "It's decision- making time for George Bush," says John Adams, head of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Unless he acts credibly, his environmental image...
...Smokestack chasing, as the practice of wooing factories has become known, is rampant in small-town America. Although often portrayed as a response to problems in the farming sector, in many cases the search is an effort to replace the industrial jobs lost in the 1980s, says Kenneth Deavers, a chief economist for the Agriculture Department. Farming and related businesses account for only about one-eighth of rural employment. Attracting new industries to a small town can be tricky. "A lot of these firms are gypsies. They fly from one set of subsidies to another," notes Mark Lapping, dean...
Stoking the smokestack revival even further, in 1984 the Reagan Administration negotiated voluntary restraint agreements, which limited imports to about 20% of the 100 million tons sold annually in the U.S. The justification was that the worldwide steel glut had forced many foreign governments to subsidize their mills, allowing them to charge artificially low prices in the U.S. In exchange for the VRAs, U.S. steelmakers agreed not to bring trade suits against overseas competitors and promised to plow excess cash into modernizing...
...times of general prosperity, large pockets of Underclass poverty persist. A new agency is needed, a revitalized Jobs Corps along the lines of a Work Projects Administration, targeted exclusively at the inner-city unemployed. One cause of the widespread unemployment in inner cities is deindustrialization: the dying out of smokestack industries and their replacement by service industries often located in the suburbs. In the cities, there is a mismatch between skills and opportunities. A jobs program would not mean useless make-work, for there is much that needs to be done, including repairing the urban infrastructure. On other issues, Dukakis...