Why I defend NAFTA on DU, in four charts

[JDPriestly]

54. Having a service-centered economy is a horrible thing.

Have you ever waited tables, answered phones as a service rep for some corporation?

And then there is the awful and true fact that a service economy does not produce products that can be sold abroad. To some extent, I believe our horrible, horrendous, awful, spectacularly outrageous NEGATIVE BALANCE OF TRADE is due to the fact that our economy has deteriorated into a service economy that does not produce enough products to sell to other countries.

Manufacturing is EVERYTHING in a robust economy.

Your charts do not take into account the negative balance of trade we have, its effect on our wages, its effect on the propensity of Americans to incur more debt than they can ever pay back, and the fact that, as was predicted in a discussion in Congress about free trade that took place in 1985, Americans are just handing hamburgers back and forth. Handing hamburgers back and forth creates a lot of economic activity. But it does not create value. It does not create products that American can sell abroad.

NAFTA has greatly contributed to the declining economy in the US.

Some of the areas in which a manufacturing economy is superior to service economy are in job security, availability of full-time employment as opposed to part-time employment (raw numbers and statistics on percentages of jobs and numbers of people working do not reflect things like health insurance paid for by job, a pension, union membership, the quality of the workplace, workplace safety, etc and all of those aspects of work especially pensions have declined in our service economy; that is McDonalds does not provide pensions for its waiters and dishwashers while Ford Motor Co. did).