Why I defend NAFTA on DU, in four charts

[pampango]

65. You forgot: Manufacturing employment grew after NAFTA until Bush; Democrats are more pro-trade than

republicans.



The number of manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979, nosedived in the early 1980's, then plateaued until Clinton became president. Manufacturing employment increased during Clinton's administration then dropped off a cliff beginning in 2001, then began to rebound again after hitting bottom in 2010.

IMHO, the common thread is that manufacturing employment declined under republican presidents, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II, while it increased under Clinton and is rebounding under Obama (although it has not recovered all the damage caused by the Bush II-induced Great Recession).

The overall decline in manufacturing employment since 1979 happened both before NAFTA and during Bush II's administration and the first 2 years of Obama's presidency in the aftermath of Bush's Great Recession. I strongly suspect that Bush II would have run the economy into the ground with or without NAFTA due to his tax cuts for the rich, financialization of the economy and overall mismanagement of the economy.

... I'm assuming that people have simply bought into Perot's anti-trade rhetoric and just forgotten the actual economic conditions of the late 1990s.

Perot always struck me as being a more typical pre-Reagan republican. In those days republicans were generally the high-tariff, low-trade party (witness Harding, Coolidge and Hoover) while Democrats tended to be the low-tariff, high-trade party (witness Woodrow Wilson, FDR and Truman). The republican base seems to often still have the "Perot/Harding/Coolidge/Hoover" attitude towards trade and immigration.