The briefing paper, “Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost 2.8 million jobs between 2001 and 2010,” by Robert Scott, reports all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have been affected by job loss and labor displacement due to trade with China. Since 2001, the U.S. trade deficit with the Communist nation has ballooned from $84 billion to $278 billion.

Some of the hardest hit states include Texas and California, losing some 232,000 and 451,000 jobs, respectively, mostly in manufacturing.

The report also identified job losses per congressional district, with the five most depleted in California. District 15 that includes portions of the Silicon Valley is said to have lost 12 percent of its labor force to the country’s trade deficit with China. California’s unemployment rate is above 12 percent, according to August figures.

From the report:

• Within manufacturing, rapidly growing imports of computer and electronic parts (including computers, parts, semiconductors, and audio-video equipment) accounted for more than 44% of the $194 billion increase in the U.S. trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2010. The growth of this deficit contributed to the elimination of 909,400 U.S. jobs in computer and electronic products in this period. Indeed, in 2010, the total U.S. trade deficit with China was $278.3 billion—$124.3 billion of which was in computer and electronic parts.

• Global trade in advanced technology products—often discussed as a source of comparative advantage for the United States—is instead dominated by China. This broad category of high-end technology products includes the more advanced elements of the computer and electronic parts industry as well as other sectors such as biotechnology, life sciences, aerospace, and nuclear technology. In 2010, the United States had a $94.2 billion deficit in advanced technology products with China, which was responsible for 34% of the total U.S.-China trade deficit. In contrast, the United States had a $13.3 billion surplus in ATP with the rest of the world in 2010.

• Other industrial sectors hit hard by growing trade deficits with China between 2001 and 2010 include apparel and accessories (178,700 jobs), textile fabrics and products (92,300), fabricated metal products (123,900), plastic and rubber products (62,000), motor vehicles and parts (49,300), and miscellaneous manufactured goods (119,700). Several service sectors were also hit hard by indirect job losses including administrative, support, and waste management services (204,300) and professional, scientific, and technical services (173,100).

The author points the finger at currency manipulation as the culprit for U.S. labor lacking a competitive edge. While most foreign currencies fluctuate freely against the dollar based on market dynamics and treasury yields, the Chinese have pegged their currency, the yuan, to the dollar, explains the report.

This is evident due to the stagnant value of the Chinese currency, despite the country’s impressive spike in production since the start of the new millennium. The currency manipulation is explained further:

But the yuan has instead remained artificially low as China has aggressively acquired dollars and other foreign exchange reserves to further depress the value of its own currency. (To depress the value of its own currency, a government sells its own currency, which increases its foreign reserves.) China had to purchase $450 billion in U.S. treasury bills and other securities between December 2009 and December 2010, alone, to maintain the peg to the U.S. dollar (International Monetary Fund 2011).

The country’s foreign exchange reserve purchases increased dramatically to $728.8 billion, for a total reserve chest of $3.2 trillion, 70 percent of which is made up of the dollar.

“This intervention makes the yuan artificially cheap relative to the dollar, effectively subsidizing Chinese exports. The best estimates place this effective subsidy at roughly 28.5% of the U.S. dollar, even after recent appreciation in the yuan,” the author writes.

The alliance for American Manufacturing released a statement following the report’s release, stating in part:

“This report offers conclusive evidence that immediate action by the Administration is needed to curb China’s currency manipulation, which, along with China’s blatant trade violations, are having the same devastating impact on high-tech production that they’ve already had on the nation’s longstanding industrial base,” said Scott Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM), a partnership of America’s leading manufacturers and the United Steelworkers union.

“And if President Obama won’t name China a currency manipulator,” Paul said, “then Congress will have no choice but to pass legislation that will hold them accountable.

Today, Branstad and Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds continued their “Jobs for Iowa” tour through the western side of the state, a conservative-influenced demographic that live in mostly small, rural communities or on farms. The 43-city tour started in June; the western leg will cover 12 communities in three days.

On the Governor’s website, Branstad touted the tour “where we will discuss the progress we made in the last legislative session and the plans we have to continue moving Iowa forward toward economic prosperity.” In addition, the Governor has been adamant commercial property tax reform will be a top priority in the 2012 Legislative session, and that such reforms are essential to making the Hawkeye State a competitive market for businesses to either relocate or expand.

But Democrats say since Branstad took office, the opposite has happened, and claim silence from the Governor’s Office has only furthered their already-germinated doubt about Iowa’s future job growth.

The state has lost 8,200 jobs since Branstad, Iowa’s longest-serving Governor, took office, according to IWD statistics, and Iowa has seen the loss of 8,700 since June alone.

The figures have prompted Democrats into action: Sen. Rob Hogg (D-Cedar Rapids) said Branstad needs to call for bipartisan action on economic development next session, the Iowa Democratic Party has filed an unanswered request for the cost of the “Jobs for Iowa” tour and Senate Democrats have expressed concern over the quality of jobs.

IDP officials said they requested records detailing all the expenses and reimbursements connected to Branstad’s job tour July 6, without a reply. Party spokesman Sam Roecker said Tuesday the party will continue to push for the records as the Governor prepares for the western leg of the town hall meetings.

Branstad spokesman Tim Albrecht said there is no discrimination against the Democrats’ wait time for the records.

“The records are in various offices and departments of government, so our office went above and beyond to obtain these records,” he said. “This takes time, and was communicated to [IDP] as we work diligently to grant them a full, accurate response to the request.”

Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal has accused the Branstad administration of “dismantling the workforce development offices,” and in part, razing job growth since the offices can serve as a physical resource for dislocated workers to receive employment assistance. The field offices are being closed in order to streamline employment assistance.

Democrats are further concerned that while Branstad has pledged 200,000 new jobs, the quality and pay of the jobs is yet to be foreseen.

“In the 1980′s, when Gov. Branstad was first Governor, it was about creating any job,” Gronstal has said. “It wasn’t about creating wealth in this state, and it did little for Iowa.”

Democrats have said in addition to their own property tax reform ideas, next session may see an effort to restore more IWD field offices.

Ed Wallace, deputy director of IWD, has said the public-private partnership under Iowa Partnership for Economic Progress, called IPEP, will focus on a range of careers, including more specialized fields like bio-technology.

“We have long been a financial hub, but information technology is something we’re really paying attention to here in Iowa, along with focusing on the health care industry, which has many high demand jobs,” Wallace told The Iowa Independent in July.

“Gov. Branstad is a pro-jobs governor who continues to work every single day to ensure every Iowan who wants a job is able to find one,” Albrecht said, adding the Governor “remains committed to creating jobs in Iowa, and will make his case to the people of Iowa in spite of the Democrats’ effort to put roadblocks in front of his job-creating solutions.”

For the fourth month in a row, Nevada remained the state with the worst unemployment rate — 14.4 percent, the highest level since the government started keeping state unemployment records. North Carolina created the most jobs, 18,600, and Michigan lost the most, 50,300. Over the course of the past year, Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina have seen the best improvements in their unemployment rates, which dropped between 1.2 and 1.4 percentage points.

In short: more evidence of a slow recovery.

Moreover, the ratio of workers looking for jobs to job openings turned down again, and now stands about 4.8 versus a high of 6.2. The higher the ratio, the greater the competition for available jobs. Here is a graph of the monthly ratio from the Economic Policy Institute:

That said, any improvement in the jobs market has been slight. And the jobseekers-to-jobs ratio has drifted lower at least in part because hundreds of thousands of discouraged workers have left the labor market (and therefore do not count in government data). EPI’s Heidi Shierholz notes:

[I]f we were to include not just the 14.6 million officially unemployed workers, but also the 2.6 million “marginally attached” workers (jobless workers who want a job, are available work, have looked for work in the last year but have given up actively seeking work and are therefore not counted as officially unemployed), the ratio would be 5.7-to-one.

There was a slice of good news in today’s jobs report about the state of long-term unemployment in America. The Labor Department reported that the share of workers who were out of a job for six months or longer fell for the third straight month ….

There are many reasons to worry about long-term unemployment. One is the human toll it takes on individuals and families. Another is a problem that economists call hysteresis, which has plagued Europe. This is the theory that the longer a person is out of work, the harder it becomes to get a new job because that person’s skills degrade. Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, was a leading researcher in this area in the 1980s.

Long-term unemployment still has a long way to go before it gets back to normal. Moreover, it’s not clear why long-term unemployment ticked down.

But I am not sure that this is a good thing. The question — and it is impossible to tell from the data — is how many of these workers found new positions and how many simply stopped looking. I fear the number declined more due to the latter than the former.Why? For one, the impact of the lapse of unemployment insurance benefits. (Workers receiving UI need to be looking for a job. For the weeks that hundreds of thousands of workers had their benefits lapse, there was no such requirement. Could that, plus the financial hardship of losing benefits, have pushed workers out of the labor force?) Additionally, the number of workers who want a job but aren’t currently looking for one increased in August — not enough to explain the entire drop, but enough to explain part of it. Moreover, the labor market just hasn’t improved much, and the longer the spell of unemployment, the harder it is to get a job.

Businesses with fewer than 50 employees accounted for 61.8 percent of all job cuts in the private sector in the fourth quarter, the Labor Department reported Wednesday, while the same sized businesses created 54.1 percent of new jobs. Companies of this size employ roughly 29 percent of all workers. The numbers are a reverse from the same time a year ago, when small businesses made up a larger share of jobs that were added as opposed to lost. Small firms made up half of all jobs lost at the end of 2008 but also comprised 53.9 percent of all job gains. …

Taken together, firms of all sizes cut a net of 200,000 jobs in the fourth quarter—as they added 6.6 million jobs, while shedding 6.8 million. That represents progress from a year earlier period, when firms shed a net 1.8 million jobs. Companies with 50 to 249 workers made 17.8 percent of all job cuts in the fourth quarter, and nearly the same percent of job gains, while mid-size companies with 250 to 999 employees added 9.9 percent of new jobs and accounted for 10 percent of job losses.

For a lot of small businesses, the ability to avoid layoffs and to expand depends on access to credit. For that reason, President Barack Obama is urging the Senate to take up a stalled small business bill when they return from recess on Sept. 14.

1. The poor are far more unemployed than the rich.
It’s not enough that they make more money anymore — despite everything that economics might normally predict, those with higher incomes are less likely to be unemployed during this recession. A new study from Northeastern University shows that among the top 20 percent of households — those making more than $100,000 — the unemployment rate is about 3.5 percent. In the poorest 10 percent of American households — those making under $12,800 a year — the unemployment rate is 30.8 percent. No wonder all those AIG bankers were threatening to leave their jobs in the midst of the recession: For them, there never was one.

2. The jobs that used to exist aren’t coming back.
Economists predict that at least 25 percent of the 8.4 million jobs that have disappeared thus far won’t be coming back no matter how good the economy gets. In fact, with job creation expected to be, at best, 133,000 new jobs per month over the next year — and 100,000 new people entering the work force every month — it will take more than 20 years at this rate to replace all the jobs that were lost in the last two years.

3. Corporations now know exactly how much money they save by firing workers.
And although the employment figures show that the rich stayed employed and the lowest-wage workers — who do most of the productive work in the economy — did not, companies laid off so many lower-paid workers that they are more flush with cash than Scrooge McDuck — to the tune of $1.19 trillion. But since people who kept their jobs have been busting their humps to keep them, productivity rates went up during the recession — which means your corporate overlords know exactly how hard they can work you for how little pay without reducing output. Get used to busting that hump.

4. Job growth is already not meeting economists’ predictions anyway.
Despite economists’ already-less-than-rosy predictions about job growth, only 95,000 jobs were created last month. So, we’re already 38,000 jobs — or more than a month — behind the growth we’d need to make back the 8.4 million lost jobs in 20 years.

5. Even Republicans don’t pretend that living wages exist for many Americans.
Nearly one in eight Americans currently depends on food stamps, and many of those people are working Americans (including some members of the military). Half of the families enrolled in food stamps are working, though fully 90 percent of those receiving benefits are below the federal poverty line. Everyone from Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) to George W. Bush and his food stamp administrator Eric Bost to former Wisconsin governor and presidential candidate Tommy Thompson is a food stamp booster for the working poor — the people who make minimum wage but can’t make ends meet. But you can have a job in this country and still go hungry — and some people who acknowledge that think the best solution is just to give companies more tax breaks.

Here’s more about the study from EurekAlert!, a science and technology news site.

Unemployment rates topping 10 percent are the highest in 26 years. Families are working more hours and taking on more part-time jobs. At the same time, unemployment benefits are running out for many families. Faced with the worst recession since the Great Depression, many U.S. families have no choice but to draw on inadequate savings to pay for essential household expenses. Many of these families are at risk of losing their housing. They may also cut back on food and healthcare to make ends meet.

The report, from Brandeis’ Institute on Assets and Social Policy, tried to measure families’ asset holding to their ability to pay for essential household expenses and also to invest in future opportunities for mobility, such as a home purchase, business start-up, retraining, or education. The report also showed that less than half of all families have sufficient savings to address essential expenses and invest in opportunities for mobility when faced with a job loss. And things get worse from there:

Moreover, many more households of color lack the financial assets to meet their expenses during periods of unemployment. Sixty-six percent of African American and Latino households are not asset secure, and only 20 percent of households of color have financial assets to invest in opportunities for mobility. While most American families lack sufficient wealth to invest in education, housing, business ventures, or training for better jobs, the dramatic distance that marks families of color is a reflection of the profound, deep, and systematic racial wealth gap.

Instead of moving to create jobs, Congress took action recently to extend the first-time homebuyer tax credit and to give homebuilders a big tax break.  Hopefully a glimpse of the harsh realities experienced by unemployed workers and their families will entice lawmakers to pass legislation that will produce many more much-needed jobs, instead of propping up home prices and paying off interest groups.

Today Obama heads to Flint, Mich., for an economic discussion at the regional technology center of a local community college.

Obama at a Chrystler plant on previous MI visit.

As Michael Moore documented almost 20 years ago, Flint is the kind of town that gets sold out by CEOs and neglected by politicians. The major job losses hit decades ago, but Flint’s population is still in free fall — it recently dropped 8 percent, to 114,000 people. Over the past three decades, the deciannual census counts show the population steadily dropped more than 10 percent.

Even as it thins out, this blue-collar base is essential to keeping Michigan blue. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry ran up his numbers to 60 percent in Genesse County, anchored by Flint, and eked by statewide at 51 percent. According to one report, Flint’s voters were rated the 10th most reliably liberal in the country — just behind San Francisco.

But Obama’s Michigan message is not all job losses and mortgage nightmares. The campaign will tap a local worker-turned-student, Jon Terbush, to kick off today’s event. Terbush, using money from a buyout after 12 years with American Axle, now is attending community college to brush up on technology and auto repair, according to a backgrounder from the campaign. Such voters have few reasons to re-up on Republican economics, as The New York Times explained today:

[T]he principal elements of Mr. McCain’s economic agenda on taxes, trade, regulation and health care follow the philosophic outlines of a deeply unpopular Bush administration. In offering new, immediate economic benefits, Mr. Obama has far outbid his Republican adversary… [Obama] has offered an ambitious range of proposals to arrest that decline and help average workers compete in a global economy.

Those proposals include a new tax credit of $500 per worker, or $1,000 for two-worker households; a new mortgage-interest credit, valued at an average of $500, for homeowners who do not itemize their tax deductions, and a college tuition subsidy of $4,000 per year for students who agree to perform community service. Mr. Obama would wipe out income taxes for older Americans earning $50,000 or less, saving some 7 million households an average of $1,400 apiece.

That’s on top of the still-unspecified subsidies Mr. Obama would provide for the purchase of health insurance for those who don’t now have it, the elimination of capital-gains taxes for small start-up businesses and an increase in the existing dependent-care tax credit that could save $1,100 for a single parent of two children who earns $40,000…

The Times reports that McCain, in contrast, is putting far less on the kitchen table:

By comparison, Mr. McCain’s list of proposals on this front is far more modest. He would double the existing child exemption to $7,000 from $3,500, but most tax-filers would not benefit because they have no dependent children or have incomes so modest that they already do not owe income taxes. Mr. McCain, of Arizona, would also offer a summer gas-tax holiday valued at about $30 a month.

Here on Obama’s plane, which is about to make the 40-minute hop from Chicago to Michigan, there’s little economic talk. Early this morning, Obama donned a White Sox cap and dropped off his daughters at their first day of school, then squeezed in a gym visit before boarding “O Force One.”

The schdeule promises a long day, with two events in Michigan and then a trip to Ohio — where Obama will continue to press for blue-collar support.