This Time, Get Global Trade Right.
Many Americans have watched their neighbors lose good-paying jobs as their employers sent their livelihoods to China. Over the last 20 years, the United States has lost nearly five million manufacturing jobs. In that same time, however, the prices that Americans pay for basic goods like T-shirts and televisions have fallen. The cost of clothing is down 8.2 percent since 1993, as “made in China” and “made in Bangladesh” labels have crowded out “made in U.S.A.” on the shelves of the local mall.
There is a national ambivalence about our trade of goods and services with the rest of the world, which has more than doubled in the last two decades. Americans want the benefits of trade — and they are potentially big and quite real, including opening up new markets to American cars and software — but they’re increasingly anxious about the downside, which includes closed factories and lower wages. The country needs to pursue new trade agreements, but this time we need to get the agreements right.
This page has long argued that removing barriers to trade benefits the economy and consumers, and some of those gains can be used to help the minority of people who lose their jobs because of increased imports. But those gains have not been as widespread as we hoped, and they have not been adequate to assist those who were harmed. As the Obama administration negotiates two big trade agreements — one with 11 countries along the Pacific Ocean and the other with the European Union — it is appropriate to take stock of what we have learned in the 20 years since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and use that knowledge to design better agreements.
To gain the support of a divided Congress and public, the administration must ensure that new agreements are much stronger than Nafta and other pacts. President Obama, who criticized the agreement with Canada and Mexico as a candidate in 2008, promised that his negotiations would avoid a race to lower costs and standards by requiring that countries adhere to common regulations in areas like labor rights, environmental protection and patents. Living up to that promise should be one of his highest priorities.
If done right, these agreements could improve the ground rules of global trade, as even critics of Nafta like Representative Sander Levin, Democrat of Michigan, have argued.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/this-time-get-global-trade-right.html?hp&rref=opinion
= new reply since forum marked as read
Which basically means there needs to be a dissolution of borders and public assistance to get people moving around.
It's not impossible (In the scientific way of "not impossible"
but it's not likely to happen, either
