EDITORIAL

Many admit that they may be less than adept at math, but one way or another, they figure it out. Maybe that's why it's difficult to understand when the government reports that the economy is getting better but jobs are still being lost.

Huh? Even without a basic understanding of numbers, a statement like that just fails to make sense.

However, something that is clear and simple is the continuing story of the real economy, unfolding every day. The unemployment rate keeps rising. It is now up to 9.4 percent, the highest in 25 years.

In contrast, the unemployment rate in Europe was always higher than the U.S.—due, in part, to the difficulty in hiring and firing people in a more flexible manner. For the first time, the U.S. jobless rate is liable to surpass Europe's rate.

In fact, the unemployment hike in the U.S. has also impacted Mexico. It has been reported that the amount of money sent home by Mexicans working in the U.S. fell by almost one-fifth compared with a year earlier.

The central bank in Mexico City marked its largest decline since the authorities began keeping track of such transfers.

Remittances, as the transfers are known, have been dropping since the end of 2007, when the construction industry in the U.S. began its sharp decline. The $25 billion sent back to Mexico in 2007 is the largest single source of foreign exchange and has reduced poverty in concentrated state and regions in Mexico.

On top of all this, the automobile and airline industries are reeling. These were the two major industries that only a few years ago, economists depicted as the lynchpin of American manufacturing.

As they slip down the economic ladder, the U.S. slides with them. The job losses keep getting bigger and the roads for recovery continue to shrink.

Aside from the peripheral industries that fed off the auto and airline industry with thousands of jobs, there is another business that is quickly being run out of town by cheap imports.

The U.S. tire industry has been all but decimated by the waves of low-priced and unfairly traded imports of consumer tires flooding the domestic market from China.

The United Steelworkers International (USW) reported that since 2004, nearly 5,100 U.S. tire workers have lost their jobs as a result of a serious erosion in the domestic market that coincides with massive increases in imports of consumer tires from China.

Until it closed last year, Goodyear's Tyler, Tx. plant made similar-sized tires for the private label market—the type China targeted when it first entered the market.

Tyler's 1,100 jobs have all disappeared.

Tyler's operation is one of six consumer tire factories that have ceased in the U.S. since 2004. At least 3,000 more jobs are on the line at plants in Georgia, Tennessee and Albama.

It doesn't take a mathematical genius to figure out that fewer jobs equals less income—and a subtraction in the quality of life for the American family.