The giant sucking sound. Oh, man. I just want
you to let those words sit in the air for a second.
It is visceral. It's weird. And honestly, if
you didn't know the context, it sounds like,
I don't know, a catastrophic plumbing emergency.
Right. Or maybe the title of a B grade sci -fi
horror movie from the 80s. It really does. Yeah.
But it's one of those phrases that if you were
around in the early 90s, it instantly triggers
a very specific memory. You probably picture
this charts and graphs billionaire on TV with
a laser pointer. Yep. But if you're younger or,
you know, if you just weren't following American
politics back then, it might sound like complete
nonsense. Exactly. But here is the thing. And
this is why we're talking about it today. This
isn't just a funny arrangement of words. This
specific sound actually defined an entire era
of American economic anxiety. You really did.
It was the viral meme of 1992. before the concept
of a mean even existed. It was the sound bite
that ate the election. And in many ways, it was
kind of the first time a mass audience was forced
to visualize globalization not as like a handshake,
but as a physical force. Right. So today we are
doing a deep dive into the source material surrounding
this exact phrase. It starts with Ross Perot
and the 1992 presidential election. Specifically,
the brawl over NAFTA. Yes, the North American
Free Trade Agreement. But our mission for this
deep dive isn't just a dry history lesson about
a trade deal. Thankfully, we're going to look
at how this catchphrase actually escaped the
orbit of American politics and traveled around
the world. We've got historical sources, media
archives and global economic reports to pull
from. It's a fascinating case study in how language
evolves. We're going to trace it from a warning
about Mexico to a description of the European
Union and eventually into a very graphic and
very strange description of politicians panicking
in Washington, D .C. And along the way, we're
going to pull out some key insights from all
these sources about globalization, labor arbitrage,
and really the physics of fear. So grab your
headphones. Maybe check your plumbing just in
case because we are diving deep into the giant
sucking sound Let's do it. Okay. Let's set the
scene. It is 1992 The US presidential campaign
is in full swing. You have the incumbent George
HW Bush You have the challenger Bill Clinton
and then you have the grenade in the room Ross
Perot the independent candidate and it's really
important to remember for those who weren't watching
back then Perot wasn't a polished politician.
Not at all. He was a Texas billionaire businessman.
He literally bought 30 minute infomercials on
primetime TV just to show people charts about
the national debt. Can you imagine that today?
30 minutes of charts, no viral dances, just bar
graphs on network television. And people watched.
They really tuned in. He brought a totally different
energy to the stage. He was blunt. He was folksy.
And he was completely obsessed with the nitty
gritty details of the economy. He wasn't speaking
in soaring political rhetoric. He was speaking
in business logic. He treated the U .S. economy
like a distressed asset that he was trying to
fix. And the specific moment we're dissecting
from our sources is the second presidential debate,
October 19th, 1992. The topic on the table is
NAFTA. Right. Now, Perot was famously against
it, but he didn't just say, you know, I think
this is suboptimal macroeconomic policy. He painted
a picture. He had to. He needed a metaphor that
would cut through all the academic talk. And
to understand the metaphor, we have to look at
the specific economic argument he was making
on that stage. Right. He wasn't just throwing
insults out there. No, he was talking about a
concept economists call factor price equalization.
OK, hold on. Factor price equalization. That
sounds exactly like the textbook definition that
puts people to sleep. Fair enough. Let's break
that down for the listener based on the debate
transcript. What was he actually pointing at?
Essentially, he was looking at the massive disparity
between the cost of labor in the United States
and the cost of labor in Mexico. He was arguing
that when you remove trade barriers between two
economies with such vastly different wage structures,
the free market will force them to meet in the
middle. Right. It's like connecting two water
tanks, one full, one empty, and you connect them
with a pipe. The water levels have to equalize.
So let's unpack the actual numbers he threw out
there in the debate because They were pretty
stark. According to the source material, Perot
was highlighting that U .S. factory workers at
the time were earning somewhere in the range
of $12, $13, or $14 an hour. Correct. And that
$12 to $14 an hour, that was the benchmark for
a middle -class American life back then. It bought
a house, a car, it bought stability. And then
he pointed south. Exactly. He argued that if
you move a factory south of the border to Mexico,
you are paying labor $1 an hour. $12 versus $1.
That is a massive gap. Any CFO looking at a spreadsheet
is going to circle that number in red ink. Oh,
absolutely. But he didn't stop at wages. Right.
Because it wasn't just about the paycheck. No.
And this is where he really tried to drive the
point home for the business -minded voters. It's
about the total cost of employment. The hidden
costs. Right. He listed the lack of benefits
in Mexico as huge cost savers for corporations.
He mentioned no retirement plans, no environmental
controls, and no pollution controls. And he's...
He specifically mentioned health care too, which
was a big deal. He did. He noted that health
care is the quote, most expensive single element
in making a car. Wow. His argument was that in
Mexico, corporations just wouldn't have to carry
that burden at all. So let's look at this from
the perspective of a CEO in 1992. Yeah. You have
cheap labor, no benefits, no environmental regulations.
Perot's conclusion was basically, if you are
a corporation and your only goal is profit, Why
would you possibly stay in the US? Precisely.
He was describing a vacuum. He was arguing that
capital money, factories, jobs, it flows like
water. It flows to the lowest point of resistance
and cost. He was directly challenging the idea
that companies had any sort of national loyalty
when the math was that clear. And that leads
us to the quote. He said, and I'm paraphrasing
the buildup here, but if you have all these factors,
there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
There it is. The auditory metaphor for U .S.
jobs leaving the country. It's such a powerful
image. He didn't say jobs will migrate. He didn't
say employment figures will shift. He said sucking
sound. It implies violence. Yes. It implies a
force of nature that you just can't stop once
you open the door. It frames the economy not
as a system of cooperation, but as a system of
predation. The sucking sound is the sound of
the U .S. being drained. It's the sound of a
whole breach on a spaceship. It really is. And
he had a pretty grim prediction about what would
happen next, because it wasn't just that the
jobs would leave. It was about what would happen
to the wages of the people left behind. This
goes back to that equalization concept we talked
about. The water tanks leveling out. Right. Perot
predicted that Mexican wages would eventually
rise. He said they might go up from $1 to $6
an hour, which sounds good for Mexico. Sure.
But, and here's the scary part for the American
voter, he argued that U .S. wages would fall
to match them. So everyone meets in the middle
at six bucks an hour, meaning the American standard
of living basically gets cut in half. Exactly.
He claimed this process would quote, wreck the
country. It was a classic argument against unchecked
globalization. the idea that it benefits the
owners of capital but ultimately hurts the laborers
in the developed world. He was basically telling
the American worker, you cannot compete with
a dollar an hour without becoming poor yourself.
And we are not endorsing that economic view or
the opposing view here, just to be clear to you
listening. We are just looking at the argument
he made. And it's a terrifying picture if you
are a factory worker in 1992. Absolutely. You're
hearing this billionaire on stage tell you that
your $14 an hour job is mathematically doomed.
But, as we know from the history books, history
took a slightly different turn. Well, the election
certainly did. Because, despite the memorable
line, Perot lost. Bill Clinton won the presidency.
And Clinton supported NAFTA. He did. The agreement
went into effect on January 1, 1994. Now before
we move on to how this phrase survived the 90s,
I have to share a little piece of trivia from
our notes. little well actually moment, because
human memory is a funny thing. Oh, I love these
details. What did you find? So we all remember
it as giant sucking sound. It's in the history
books. It's on Wikipedia. But if you look at
the original transcript from the Commission on
Presidential Debates and PBS, they transcribed
it slightly differently back then. They originally
wrote it down as job sucking sound. Job sucking
sound. That doesn't have quite the same ring
to it, does it? Not at all. Giant sucking sound
feels momentous. It feels cinematic. Job sucking
sound feels, I don't know, a bit clunky, a bit
too literal. It just goes to show how collective
memory works. We culturally remembered the version
that hit harder. Giant gives it scale. It turns
it into a monster. Right. Job sucking sounds
like a localized HR problem. Giant sucking sound
sounds like a national catastrophe. Exactly.
So NAFTA passes, GRO loses, the world moves on.
But the phrase didn't disappear. it actually
started to travel. This is where the story gets
really interesting to me as we look at the later
sources. This is the linguistic evolution part.
The phrase detached itself from the specific
context of the 1992 US -Mexico debate. And it
just became a piece of general slang for economic
fear. It became the go -to term for unwanted
labor exportation. Or even just the fear of it.
Any time one nation felt like they were losing
jobs to a rival, especially a rival with lower
costs, that sound came up. It stopped being about
Ross Perot and started being about the universal
feeling of vulnerability. And it wasn't just
Americans using it. The notes mention a European
Union representative actually using the phrase
on the record. Yes. This was a specific instance
where an EU rep spoke about worrying about quote,
the giant sucking sound from Eastern Europe.
So in that context, Western Europe plays the
role of the US. the high -wage, high -regulation
zone. And Eastern Europe plays the role of Mexico.
Exactly. The dynamic is identical. You have established
higher -wage economies, fearing the pull of developing
lower -wage economies right next door. Right.
It shows that the anxiety Perot tapped into wasn't
uniquely American. It's a feature of globalized
economics. Whenever you have a border separating
high wages and low wages, somebody is going to
hear that sound. It's interesting because it
suggests that the sound isn't a specific countries.
It's about the gradient. It's about the slope.
That's a great way to put it. It's about the
slope of the economic playing field. Speaking
of slopes and globalization, here's where it
gets highly ironic. There was a great observation
from Thomas Friedman in our source material.
Now, Friedman is the guy who wrote, the world
is flat. Right. He's generally known as a big
cheerleader for globalization. He is. He's always
looking for those massive global shifts. And
years after Perot made his prediction, Friedman
looked at the global data and opined that the
tables had completely turned. What did he see?
He noted that Mexicans were now hearing the giant
sucking sound themselves. Wait, so the jobs went
to Mexico. And then Mexico started losing them.
Yes. Friedman said they were hearing it in stereo
from China in one ear and India in the other.
That is wild. So the sucking sound kept moving
east to Asia. It illustrates the relentless nature
of what economists often call the race to the
bottom regarding labor costs. Perot warned that
U .S. jobs would go to Mexico because it was
cheaper. Right. But eventually China joined the
World Trade Organization. India opened up its
economy and suddenly Mexico wasn't the cheapest
option anymore. So the very thing Perot warned
would happen to the U .S. that feeling of helplessness
as jobs vanish happened to the country he was
originally afraid of. Precisely. It really highlights
that in a global there is always a South. Always
a South. There is always somewhere with lower
costs, at least until the entire global standard
of living levels out. It's like a really stressful
game of musical chairs. But every time the music
stops, the chair is in a different country. And
the South isn't a compass direction anymore.
It's just an economic state of being cheaper
than the next guy. That's a perfect summary.
And it validates the underlying mechanism Perot
was talking about, capital chasing the lowest
cost. Even if his specific prediction didn't
play out exactly. Right. Even if the US wasn't
completely wrecked by Mexico the way he thought,
the mechanism was real. The geography just kept
shifting. So the phrase traveled geographically,
but it also started to travel contextually. It
wasn't just about international trade deals anymore.
It started popping up in domestic industries
that have nothing to do with manufacturing. It
became a shorthand for any drastic economic downturn.
It's like we needed a vocabulary for mass disappearance.
For instance, we have an example from Joe Sharkey,
a columnist for the New York Times. This was
years later. Right. And this was in the airline
industry. Totally different sector. Sharkey used
the headline, That Giant Sucking Sound, to introduce
a serious discussion about a massive slump in
employment at major US carriers. And he wasn't
talking about outsourcing pilots to Mexico. No,
not at all. He was talking about a 34 % slump
in employment over a four -year period. Wow.
He was talking about bankruptcy, consolidation,
and layoffs. just due to brutal market conditions.
So in this case, the sucking sound wasn't jobs
going to another country. It was just jobs vanishing
into thin air because of an industry collapse.
Exactly. The metaphor shifted from displacement
to just disappearance. It signifies a vacuum
where prosperity used to be. It's the sound of
the air leaving the room. It shows how versatile
the phrase became. It basically just meant bad
economic news involving large numbers. OK, but
my absolute favorite usage, and I use the word
favorite loosely, here because this is a little
graphic, comes from the world of political comedy
or maybe just political anger. I have a feeling
I know which one you're talking about. This is
the curveball in the research. It really is the
curveball. So fast forward to 2009, totally different
era. We are in the middle of the great financial
crisis. The banks are failing. The housing market
is crushed. Congress is intensely debating the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The big
stimulus bill. Right. A very tense time in Washington.
Trillions of dollars on the line. Everyone is
on edge. Very tense. And enter U .S. Congressman
Steve Littrede, a Republican from Ohio. He's
on the House floor. He is criticizing the bill
and he decides to invoke the ghost of Ross Perot.
But with a twist. A very biological twist. A
major twist. Again, we're impartially quoting
the sources here. He says, quote, Well, today
there's another sucking sound going on in Washington,
D .C. And that's the tightening of sinkers on
both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, as people are
having to explain who put into the stimulus bill
this provision of law. That is certainly vivid
imagery. The tightening of sphincters. I mean,
wow. He took a phrase about macroeconomic trade
policy and turned it into a crude joke about
terrified politicians. It's crude, yes. But if
we analyze it, and let's try to do this seriously
for a second, it's actually a really interesting
evolution of the language. How so? Beyond just
being a gross -out insult. Well, look at the
core emotion behind it. Perot's original usage
was entirely about fear. The fear of the American
worker losing their livelihood. Lutterette flips
it to describe the fear of the political class
getting caught doing something unpopular. So
the sucking sound is still fundamentally the
sound of fear. Exactly. It's the sound of panic.
Whether it's panic about factories closing or
panic about a legislative scandal, the phrase
captures that sudden contraction, that moment
where you realize you have lost control. It really
de -elevates the discourse, doesn't it? Yeah.
Perot was trying to be a statesman warning of
national doom. Lutourette is making a bathroom
joke on the house floor. They are both tapping
into that exact same visceral feeling of, uh
-oh. It proves that if an image is strong enough,
it will stick around. Even if the original meaning
gets a little distorted or corrupted along the
way, it becomes a reliable container for our
anxieties. So let's bring this all together for
you listening. We've gone from Perot's charts
to the EU, to China, to the airline industry,
and finally to the floor of Congress in 2009.
What does a journey of the giant sucking sound
actually tell us? I think it tells us that economic
anxiety is a permanent fixture in our lives.
Ross Perot put a memorable name to a very specific
fear, the fear that someone somewhere else is
willing to do your job for less money. And that
fear definitely didn't end with NAFTA. Not at
all. As we saw with the Thomas Friedman example,
that fear just moves around. It moved to Europe.
It moved to China and India. And even today,
we hear similar rhetoric. We hear about reshoring,
about tariffs, about protecting domestic industries.
The vocabulary changes, but the underlying fear
of the sucking sound is identical. It's like
the sound is always there in the background noise
of the global economy. It's the constant hum
of globalization. And it's a reminder that policies
like trade agreements aren't just dry legal documents.
They have visceral emotional impacts on real
people. Perot understood that. He completely
bypassed the intellectual arguments, all the
factor price equalization stuff we talked about,
and he went straight for the gut or the ear in
this case. He definitely knew how to make a headline.
It's funny, even though we lost the election,
that one phrase probably had more cultural impact
than a lot of the actual policies discussed that
entire year. I would agree. It became a permanent
part of the lexicon. It gave people language
to express their insecurity about the future.
And once you give people language for a feeling,
they do not let go of it easily. So here's a
final provocative thought to leave you with.
We track the sound from the US to Mexico and
then from Mexico to China and India. But the
world keeps spinning. Economies keep changing.
Wages in China are rising now. Right. The South
is moving again, maybe to Vietnam, maybe to parts
of Africa. But there's another layer to this,
isn't there? If that sucking sound represents
the flow of opportunity to wherever it's cheapest
or most efficient, where is the sound coming
from today? That is the big question. Is there
always going to be a geographical South? Or,
as automation and artificial intelligence enter
the picture, Maybe the sound isn't coming from
another country at all anymore. Wow. Maybe the
sound is coming from the server farm down the
street. That is a chilling thought. The giant
sucking sound of the future might just be the
hum of a cooling fan on an AI server. It very
well might be. And that is a fear that no border
wall or trade tariff can really stop. On that
cheerful note, thank you for joining us on this
deep dive into 90s political history and global
economics. We will catch you on the next one.
Bye -bye, everyone.