When I go into a store to buy a new shirt I am as sensitive to price as the next guy. But when I get a real deal on that Chinese-made shirt it will be goodie for me and not so goodie for us.

My cheap shirt is a real problem for America.

We may regularly talk about the irresponsibility of budget deficits, but what gets far less attention is America’s trade deficit, which now stands at more than $800 billion a year. That we buy so much more from abroad than we sell cannot continue if Americans are going to enjoy a secure economic future.

I don’t want to be able to buy a cheap shirt from China if it means my country loses good jobs, has to sell off national assets and is put further in debt to foreign nations and banks. And if our national leaders were more responsible on trade issues they wouldn’t be putting me in a predicament where the rational choice I make for myself is irrational for the common good.

“Free trade” is not the glorious win-win-win-even-bigger economic miracle that so many economists and politicians trumpet. There are demonstrable downsides for American workers, even skilled workers, and our continued record trade imbalances threaten a sharp decline in the average American’s living standards. Our debt will one day lose its luster for our trading partners. Then, watch out.

In a 2004 op-ed column in the New York Times titled “The Broken Promise of NAFTA,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz looked back on 10 years of the continental free trade agreement and found many of the promotional claims were empty promises. Mexico didn’t expand its economy to bolster a middle class. Its paltry 1 percent per capita growth was far poorer than in earlier years. Income disparities between Mexico and the United States grew by 10.6 percent; and real wages for Mexican workers fell annually.

President Clinton told us that NAFTA would mean “less illegal immigration because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home.” But the opposite came to pass. In 1995 there were estimated to be just 2.5 million illegal immigrants here, a number that now stands at about 11 million.

Meanwhile, NAFTA’s impact on the United States has been a growing trade deficit with Mexico and Canada as well as reduced wages to American workers, by $7.6 billion in just 2004 alone, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. About a million U.S. workers have had to take worse-paying jobs due to displacements caused by NAFTA, mostly out of the manufacturing sector.

Pro-globalization types scream “protectionism” as if it’s a dirty word. The fact is, we have not abandoned protectionism for the politically connected. Subsidies exist to shield many products in our agricultural sector from free-market forces, particularly corn. Moreover, our trade agreements contain all sorts of protections for the intellectual property of business. If trade accords can include patent protections, they can include enforceable labor and environmental standards.

“This is a society, not just an economy,” Jeff Faux, founder of EPI and author of “The Global Class War,” says about how our nation should approach trade issues. Faux says that the decision to undermine American job security for lower prices on imports is a calculation that favors the interests of capital over labor. Corporate investors get rich in a global economy while workers compete to underbid each other.

He suggests we think of it this way: Transpose the global economy with the U.S. economy. Here, if we didn’t have a minimum wage or environmental regulations, prices would also be lower. But we don’t opt for that kind of society and neither should we allow the exploitation of human or natural resources to happen through the back door of globalization.

President Bush has been stumping for free trade recently, even telling Caterpillar factory workers in East Peoria, Ill., that “free trade agreements are helping” to create American factory jobs. He, of course knows what an embroidered canard that is. Thanks to these agreements, American companies are moving their R&D functions, production and marketing overseas at an accelerating pace. Foreign countries now account for 50 percent of all U.S.-owned manufacturing output.

Bush wants fast-track trade authority reauthorized before it expires at the end of June so he can continue the free trade excesses. A few courageous senators, led by Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., are insisting on fair and reciprocal trade agreements that protect American labor and environmental standards.

They should stand tough. I have more than enough cheap shirts. What I really need is a country that cares about its workers and economic fundamentals as much as its corporate investors.