NAFTA at 20: One Million U.S. Jobs Lost, Higher Income Inequality

[okaawhatever]

23. The EPI study, and the claims made in this "report" are laughable. A sixth grader can see the

failure of the methodology. I don't have time to go through the myriad erroneous claims, but in any study/report there are red flags that point to it being propaganda and not data.

For example:
They don't use the same years for their different claims, they've cherry picked time frames that support their conclusions

They don't account for other factors affecting trade and employment. There were huge trade deficits racked up, but they were due to the deep recession that Mexico went into shortly after the signing and the economic boom the US went into. And no, the recession didn't have anything to do with NAFTA, it had to do with their currency and other internal problems. Mexico's imports went down across the board, not just with the US. Countries in deep recession don't have the same demand for goods, this is economics 101. For your reports authors to attempt to assign the deficit solely to NAFTA is academic fraud.

Much of the growth in imports from Canada comes in the form of unrefined oil. It is refined in our refinieries and then exported to non-NAFTA countries. This isn't hurting American jobs, in fact it increases them, because the product isn't being consumed in our country. They aren't telling you that because it doesn't support their agenda.

Here is an example of their claims:

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, two out of every three displaced
manufacturing workers who were rehired in 2012 experienced a wage reduction, most of
them taking a pay cut of greater than 20 percent.8

Why did they just pick one year out of 20 for that statistic? Simple, because the manufacturing workers going back to work were laid off due to the housing crisis/recession and not NAFTA and that was the year that made their numbers look good.


Your report is so pathetic, I don't have time to dispute all their erroneous and misleading information. It is propaganda, pure and simple.