Who determined that the NSA and TPP are the most important issues?

[laundry_queen]

242. Well, I understand economic issues

and unless all my textbooks and profs are wrong, NAFTA was a net loss for Americans. There are statistics that show NAFTA directly cost 6-700,000 jobs in the US.

Here's the thing with free trade. It's touted by economists as great because it's supposed to give the countries with the most efficiency in certain areas the job of producing or servicing the rest of the world in an efficient manner. For instance, if country A produces apples and oranges, and country B produces oranges and mangos...if country A concentrates on apples, then country B can concentrate on oranges, and another country that is great at growing mangoes can concentrate on that. Because of a scale economy, productions costs plummet, more oranges, apples and mangoes are produced and they are therefore cheaper. The premise is that people will then save money on their apple, orange and mango purchases and then use that money elsewhere to boost the economy. It's also assumed that the assets from the orange industry in country A will eventually be diverted to the apple industry or they will find another commodity to concentrate on that country A will also be more efficient at producing.

This model doesn't take into consideration that corporations often don't 'pass it on' when they save money on production - they hoard it for their shareholders. It used to be that it was more beneficial for corporations to reinvest their profits in their companies due to tax rates. Not anymore...shareholders prefer to pocket profits. When corporations don't pass it on, people are still paying the same for the commodities, but now they have a net loss of jobs, because no new jobs were created with the money saved on production.

This is what happened with NAFTA. The premise was that we would move manufacturing to Mexico, where there was cheap labor, and the money that we saved on the products would then be reinvested into other industries in the US that the US could provide more efficiently (in one of my texts I think the example was the banking industry, lol) and those industries would make up for the jobs lost in manufacturing. Well, we all know that didn't happen. Companies kept the profits for themselves, and the people who lost their good manufacturing jobs flooded low-paying service jobs just trying to put food on the table. They were then required to buy the cheaper stuff from Mexico, because they no longer could afford American made. This made even more American companies, with lost sales, move manufacturing to Mexico, which resulted in even fewer manufacturing jobs. It's a downward spiral. THEN, with cheap transportations costs, companies figured out that Asia was even cheaper, and now Mexico is in dire straights with abandoned factories everywhere - jobs gone overseas for that extra .5% profit margin to go in shareholder's pockets.

The TPP will make this overseas outsourcing even easier and cheaper. We didn't touch much on the TPP in class because there isn't much information out there but the basic statement from all profs was, "this is going to mean bad things for North America". It's another grab by the 1% to boost their incomes.

Oh, and another way this all hurts the economy: the companies that are able to shift their production overseas first have a huge price advantage and often put any competition out of business. This results in monopolies and a distinct lack of competition. Theoretically, all capitalism eventually leads to monopoly. This is why regulations are needed. Free trade and lack of regulations allows companies to consolidate and produce on a massive scale so that no start up can even hope to compete. Some say this is incentive for innovation. I disagree - when people are so busy trying to make ends meet, they don't have time for start ups and innovation. Especially when they are tied to companies for their health care.

Anyway, I don't know if you were being genuine in wanting to understand or not, but I thought I'd put this out there anyway. It's a bit disjointed as I'm being harassed by a 6 year old, LOL.