The jobs are going whether we sign agreements or not. [View all]

[Recursion]

If I could hammer home one fact that people just don't get, it's that.

You know the horrific article about the woman who lost her hands in an LG factory in Mexico? The factory was built in 1983, 11 years before NAFTA. LG (actually Zenith at the time) shipped its jobs across the Rio Grande. It didn't need a trade agreement to do that.

China and India have no free trade agreement with the US, but they're where a majority of offshored jobs go. And some of the stuff US companies do there is horrible. And don't even get me started about Bangladesh. American light manufacturing labor can't compete with developing world light manufacturing labor, and companies don't need free trade agreements to take advantage of that (India, China, and Bangladesh are exhibits 1, 2, and 3 there).

Those jobs keep going, and new jobs keep coming. The unemployment rate is actually lower right now than in 1993, and the discouraged worker rate is much much lower (it's only 0.5% right now; it was something like 2% in 1993).

You can't tariff your way out of that, because a corporation will be happy to take lower labor costs and have the consumer pay the tariff. It just means the TVs will be more expensive when we buy them.

There is no long-term way to return mass manufacturing employment to the US. There just isn't. We need to find something else for people to do. The manufacturing sector is actually doing well, and manufacturing more than at any point in history. I recently posted an article about a textiles factory that moved to Mexico in the nineties and recently moved back to South Carolina. They produce more yarn now than they did in 1992. But they employ 140 people now as opposed to 2000 then.

Trade agreements are not the problem; you're mistaking the symptom for the disease (for that matter, ask yourself to whose interest it is that you believe that). Trade agreements are an attempt to exert some form of government control over this economic transition, and to have some kind of outside arbitration for disputes.

Even China and India can't keep this going long, and they know it. Currently a Chinese factory worker is cheaper than a robot, but that isn't going to last much longer.

This happened 150 years ago with farms. Agricultural automation threw millions of people out of work, and there was a very disruptive transition period to an industrial economy. Automation in manufacturing is doing that same thing now (I've lost one job to Indonesia and four to automation, personally).

I don't particularly care about the TPP and I'm pretty concerned about what I've seen from the intellectual property side. After I read it I may well be against it, though I'm open to seeing what they come up with first. But it doesn't really matter whether it passes or not; it's a response to economic forces we can't undo rather than their cause.

It may be comforting to take the general malaise and anxiety that middle- and working-class Americans face and give it an acronym to name it, but the simple fact is that no matter what we do, these changes are happening.