NAFTA’s Legacy: Growing U.S. Trade Deficits Cost 682,900 Jobs [View all]

[brentspeak]

Perhaps you've seen some post on DU celebrating/defending NAFTA, or otherwise pimping TPP.

And you might ask yourself: Who are these people promulgating this revisionist bull$hit? And why are they here?

Well, some of these people are employed by conservative think tanks (but posing as "liberal&quot ; or perhaps they work for Wall Street-funded "centrist" groups such as the Peterson Institute or the Pew Research Center; or maybe you could be reading a post written by some flunky working for the new pseudo-"progressive" pro-TPP astroturf front group created by the 270 Strategies PR firm, and made up of Obama campaign alumni and funded by deep Wall St. pockets.

One facet of their jobs is to make you -- the casual reader who surfed onto DU hoping to communicate with fellow Democrats and progressives -- believe that NAFTA didn't actually cost the United States hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs, or otherwise drag down middle-class incomes. The other facet of their jobs is to make you think that TPP is "good". The people who write their checks make a lot of money by way of corporate-authored "free trade" deals. You, on the other hand, stand to lose your income, your job, your retirement savings -- and so will your children and their children. The less money you and your children make, the more the multi-national corporations and hedge funds pushing for TPP make. It's that simple.

Anyway, here's some genuine information about NAFTA and the deleterious effects it has on the US economy:

http://www.epi.org/publication/nafta-legacy-growing-us-trade-deficits-cost-682900-jobs/

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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