Sunday, July 03, 2005

Missing - The Los Angeles Times

It was right where it usually is. Laying flat in the middle of my driveway, wrapped in plastic, in every way it appeared to be my Sunday LA Times. I’ve been considering dropping the subscription because of their slanted writing, but you need to hear the other side.

So, I took my usual journey. News first, then funnies, mags and other fun stuff. Finish off with business and Opinion. Everything seemed perfectly normal until I reached the lead op-ed piece. I checked the masthead of that page, and it still said Los Angeles Times.

You can read it for yourself here, but the main points were:

Economists and others are worried about the Chinese hoarding dollars and now starting to use them to buy American assets. We have seen this concern before with the Japanese 15 years ago. They were wrong to worry then, they are wrong to worry now.

This seemed a bit odd for the Times, but I wasn’t shocked yet. The article went on:

1. If there is a problem the fault is not theirs, its ours. We’re the ones doing the spending on their goods.

2. Free trade is good, even if its unilateral. Every American, especially the poor, benefit from inexpensive goods.

3. Globalization means that we own stock in Chinese companies, and our companies own production facilities in China that make much of the stuff that comes back here.

Therefore all of this is good for America. WOW! The only thing they forgot was the natural order of things that will see increasing wages and decreasing interest in doing “dirty” work as China emerges.

I’m just curious though. What paper did I receive this morning, and where is my Los Angeles Times.

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