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

[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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[randys1]

1. What is stunning to me is NAFTA and TPP are the exact OPPOSITE of what we need to do.

What we need to do would end up being protectionism, not unlike what China now does to us and others.

But this would require the one tenth of the one percent to be willing to only make hundreds of millions in profits, not billions.

That is really what we are talking about.

I would explain what we need to do, it is rather simple, but no point.

Never happen, unless we get mad.

And it would only be short term protectionism.



Then, someone here the other day had a brilliant idea.

If a company is profiting off of robotics, TAX them so we can support the humans in the damn country

[KoKo]

2. Recommend...

[randys1]

5. It is so cool that every Friday Thom gets to have a presidential candidature on his show

aint it

Now here is the deal.

BERNIE actually could win, but for that to happen social media has to explode with him.

Twitter, etc.

[sufrommich]

3. "What we need to do would end up being protectionism"

That's the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to say that out loud.

[Populist_Prole]

4. It's so simple: If you're in a hole; first step is to stop digging!

How stupid do they think we are?

[AZ Progressive]

6. Not only that, NAFTA ruined a LOT of Mexican farmers' livelihoods, causing many to cross the border

As heavily subsidized U.S. corn and other staples poured into Mexico, producer prices dropped and small farmers found themselves unable to make a living. Some two million have been forced to leave their farms since Nafta. At the same time, consumer food prices rose, notably the cost of the omnipresent tortilla.

As a result, 20 million Mexicans live in “food poverty”. Twenty-five percent of the population does not have access to basic food and one-fifth of Mexican children suffer from malnutrition. Transnational industrial corridors in rural areas have contaminated rivers and sickened the population and typically, women bear the heaviest impact.

and

Nafta’s failure in Mexico has a direct impact on the United States. Although it has declined recently, jobless Mexicans migrated to the United States at an unprecedented rate of half a million a year after Nafta.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/24/what-weve-learned-from-nafta/under-nafta-mexico-suffered-and-the-united-states-felt-its-pain

[JEB]

7. K&R for the original post and subsequent informative posts and links.

[pa28]

8. The point of those fallacious pro-nafta arguments you read here is to delay just long enough.

And by 'just long enough' I mean distract the discussion with false arguments and delay the appearance of a consensus until it's too late to stop.

Climate change deniers use the same tactic.