Carter was no liberal

[Recursion]

9. No. This crap about NAFTA is ridiculous. The late 1990s and early 2000s were great years for workers

From the passage of NAFTA until W fucked up the economy by cutting taxes, workers made gains in every single metric. Unemployment went down. Labor force participation went up. Median wages went up. The median income in all five quintiles went up. Exports increased. Contrary to the lie you'll see repeated here over and over, US manufacturing output increased. I have no idea why people make such a point of ignoring what actually happened just because somebody told them that "neoliberals" (or whatever the catch phrase is this week) like trade.

And before anybody trots out the old "it was the tech boom" horse:

1. NAFTA was part of the tech boom (we could export more chips)
2. The tech boom destroyed more jobs than a trade agreement could ever dream of doing. (Remember travel agents? How many are there now? Hell, most of the manufacturing job losses in the interim were from automation -- part of the tech boom. You know this because again US manufacturing output went up not down after NAFTA's passage. US factories make more and more, using fewer workers to do it. Just like our farms started doing 100 years ago. But why doesn't anybody call for a rolling back of the 1990s technology boom?)