"Comfort zone" refers to a person's willingness to try something new, not to endorse something proven (by NAFTA) to have horrific impact upon wages, unemployment levels, the trade deficit, and virtually guaranteed to expose consumers to all kinds of dangers by precluding local and national governments from imposing safety regulations!
We're not talking moving out of a comfort zone like say, trading in an old cell phone for the latest, and most complicated, technology available; or moving from a familiar neighborhood to the other side of town; or vacationing in Europe for the first time after a life time of summer vacations in Ocean City.
The TPP is a treacherous and, in the words of the Washington Post, "labyrinthian agreement", negotiated in secret.
There are a wide variety of serious issues that need to be discussed by Congress and the American public. For example, the Washington Post reported:
The United States is proposing a number of provisions designed to strengthen and extend brand-name pharmaceutical companies' monopoly privileges. For example, several provisions would support the pharmaceutical firms' practice of "ever-greening" in which a firm will hold a patent on drug 'x' in tablet form, then later obtain a patent on drug 'x' in a gel cap, and later still obtain another patent on the same drug in capsule form. This extends patent life on a known substance, despite no new medical efficacy; thus it delays generic competition.
As another example,
[TPP] includes provisions similar to those of the failed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) that the European Parliament ultimately rejected. The United States appears to be using the non-transparent Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations as a deliberate end run around Congress on intellectual property, to achieve a presumably unpopular set of policy goals.
Free-trade agreements, such as TPP, haven't protected U.S. jobs.
Public Citizen reported that since 1994, "the [freed-trade agreement] deficit surge implies the loss of nearly one million American jobs." Public Citizen said wherever there were free-trade agreements US trade deficits increased and in the countries not covered by free-trade agreements our deficits decreased.
Recently, Campaign for America's Future revisited the US trade agreement with Mexico -- NAFTA:
In 1993, the broadest assurance by those selling this model - including almost all Republicans and President Clinton - was that it would create U.S. jobs by expanding the trade surplus the U.S. then enjoyed with Mexico... Now the U.S. suffers chronic $60 billion-$70 billion annual trade deficits with Mexico and by this summer the accumulated U.S. current account losses with Mexico under NAFTA will pass $1 trillion.
The Economic Policy Institute says the US lost an estimated 700,000 jobs due to NAFTA.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-burnett/trans-pacific-partnership_b_4479420.html
http://www.citizen.org/documents/FTA-V-No-FTA-Factsheet.pdf
http://ourfuture.org/20131217/nafta-20-years-of-spin-for-americas-failed-globalization-model
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/11/15/five-key-questions-and-answers-about-the-leaked-tpp-text/
Finally, Obama promises us that in the long run, the TPP will be for the "greater good". Well that will be true for the One Percent/Investor class, but not for the rest of us, as per the voluminous statistics and negative results as documented hereinabove. So let's define our terms here: Obama's "greater" refers to the ones with the greatest weath.
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