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Why? How many times have we been proven wrong? (i.e., "Obamacare"
I'm going to take my chances with this president's decision. I think he's a brilliant man and I DO NOT at all believe--and will NEVER believe--that he would deliberately do anything to harm the American worker.
NAFTA’s Legacy Growing U.S. Trade Deficits Cost 682,900 Jobs
By Robert E. Scott | December 17, 2013
Former President Bill Clinton claimed that NAFTA would create an “export boom to Mexico” that would create 200,000 jobs in two years and a million jobs in five years, “many more jobs than will be lost” due to rising imports. The economic logic behind his argument was clear: Trade creates new jobs in exporting industries and destroys jobs when imports replace the output of domestic firms. Fast forward 20 years and it’s clear that things didn’t work out as Clinton promised. NAFTA led to a flood of outsourcing and foreign direct investment in Mexico. U.S. imports from Mexico grew much more rapidly than exports, leading to growing trade deficits, as shown in the Figure. Jobs making cars, electronics, and apparel and other goods moved to Mexico, and job losses piled up in the United States, especially in the Midwest where those products used to be made. By 2010, trade deficits with Mexico had eliminated 682,900 good U.S. jobs, most (60.8 percent) in manufacturing.
Claims by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that NAFTA “trade” has created millions of jobs are based on disingenuous accounting, which counts only jobs gained by exports but ignores jobs lost due to growing imports. The U.S. economy has grown in the past 20 years despite NAFTA, not because of it. Worse yet, production workers’ wages have suffered in the United States. Likewise, workers in Mexico have not seen wage growth. Job losses and wage stagnation are NAFTA’s real legacy.
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How did I miss that! Democrats are always signing international agreements and allowing other countries into international organizations. Herbert Hoover would not be happy though FDR might think they are unsurprising developments.
The economy might do much better under Democrats with more jobs and higher wages but the poor republicans just inherit the 'mess' that Democrats leave them and then get blamed for our economic problems that are really the fault of Democrats. Poor GWB inherited NAFTA and PNTR. What was he supposed to do?
You are right though. The growth of the Chinese economy affected our economy just like the recovery of the European and Japanese economies affected us in the decades after WWII. It would be nice, I suppose, if the US were an island that was never affected by economic, political or military events in other parts of the world. Or if the rest of the world did not recover from the devastation of war or the chaos caused by a dictator, so that we could be the undisputed powerhouse and rule-setter for the rest of the world forever.
But, alas, that is not going to happen. We are part of the world just like Germany, Sweden and Canada are. Eventually we will learn to act like it and stop seeing ourselves as 'exceptional' and entitled to set the world's economic, military and political rules to our maximum advantage.
Without PNTR and China joining the WTO, China would still be an economic backwater like it was under Mao? Keeping the largest country in the world out of the organization that sets and enforces international trading rules seems a bit America-centric. China signed FDR's ITO agreement and would have been a member if congress had not shot the whole thing down.
Russia's economy survived for many years before it joined the WTO in 2012. I suspect that keeping China out of the WTO by denying it PNTR would not have affected China's economic growth any more than it affected Russia's.
