Harold Meyerson

I don't know why I read Harold Meyerson, but I do. Maybe it's because I am intrigued by what new half-baked argument he will employ against free trade. Today's column I think takes the cake:

Read these commentaries, and you'd never know that America has gone from being a nation that manufactured things to a nation that manufactures debt. Manufacturing (as Kevin Phillips points out in the forthcoming issue of the American Prospect, which I edit) accounted for 25 percent of America's gross domestic product in the 1970s but just 12 percent in 2006. Finance, which amounted to 12 percent of GDP in the '70s, amounted to 20 percent in 2006.

Meyerson is obviously completely economically illiterate. He thinks that replacing manufacturing jobs with high-paying finance jobs is a bad thing. The mind boggles.