Today's NY Times Provides Right-Wing Analysis of Trade & Trade Deficits and the Candidates

[amborin]

Progressive Think Tanks and Organizations Document the Downside of FTAs and Trade Deficits:

Trans-Pacific Partnership, currency manipulation, trade, and jobs: U.S. trade deficit with the TPP countries cost 2 million jobs in 2015, with job losses in every state

March 3, 2016 | By Robert E. Scott and Elizabeth Glass | Report
Despite seemingly stable U.S. trade balance, rapidly growing trade deficits in non-oil goods could lead to American job losses
February 5, 2016 | By Robert E. Scott | Blog

Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement: Currency manipulation, trade, wages, and job loss
January 13, 2016 | By Robert E. Scott | Report

A Conservative Estimate of ‘The Wal-Mart Effect': Wal-Mart’s growing trade deficit with China has displaced more than 400,000 U.S. jobs
December 9, 2015 | By Robert E. Scott | Report

http://www.epi.org/research/trade-deficit/

But today's front page NY Times has an attack on these positions (and on both Sanders and Trump):

Trade Deficits: These Times are Different - The New York Times
New York Times‎ - 1 hour ago

In normal times, the counterpart of a trade deficit is capital inflows, which reduce interest ...
The Upshot|The Trade Deficit Isn't a Scorecard, and Cutting It Won't Make America Great Again
New York Times‎ - 18 hours ago

NY Times' position aligns with right-wing Cato Institute's:

power that allow the U.S. to get its way in international politics.
America's Maligned and Misunderstood Trade Deficit | Cato ...

www.cato.org/.../trade.../americas-maligned-misunderstood-...
Cato Institute
by D Griswold - ‎Cited by 16 - ‎Related articles

America's annual trade deficit, already large by historical standards, could reach a new record in 1998, fueling protectionist sentiment in Congress. Political ...
Is The U.S. Trade Deficit Really Bad News? | Cato Institute
www.cato.org/.../is-us-trade-deficit-really-bad-news
Cato Institute
America's merchandise trade deficit could hit $250 billion in 1998, propelled to a record high by financial turmoil and plunging growth rates in the Far East.

[BernieforPres2016]

1. That has to be embarrassing to NYT columnist Paul Krugman who recently admitted he has been wrong

to champion free trade.

Can't the people at the NYT get their story straight?

http://www.thenation.com/article/paul-krugman-raises-the-white-flag-on-trade/

<The Nobel Prize–winning economist now admits in a column and blog that the orthodox case he championed for “free-trade” globalization was mostly garbage. Now he tells us. On a point of personal privilege, I claim the right to hoot derisively.

I am among the supposedly misguided reporters who didn’t major in economics but wrote critically about what we saw unfolding in the “manic logic of global capitalism” (the subtitle for my One World, Ready or Not, which Krugman dismissed as “a thoroughly silly book”). The multinationals were colonizing the world while systematically draining America of manufacturing and the core jobs of our broadly shared prosperity. Meanwhile, the globalizing companies brutishly exploited the low-wage peasant workers in their new factories in Asia.>

[pampango]

3. Krugman's point seemed to me to be that freer trade only helps if a government redistributes

the resulting income gains fairly. That certainly does not happen in the US - neither the gains from freer trade nor those from the much larger domestic economy unrelated to trade are redistributed fairly. OTOH, in progressive countries where the gains from the domestic economy and from freer trade are shared broadly, trade is embraced and considered beneficial.

When FDR and Truman pushed for freer trade after WWII they probably could not imagined that the New Deal would one day be gutted and buried, replaced by the same kind of corporate dominance and income inequality that existed in the 1920's.

... the conventional case for trade liberalization relies on the assertion that the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone wins — but we now have an ideology utterly opposed to such redistribution in full control of one party, and with blocking power against anything but a minor move in that direction by the other.

The truth is that if Sanders were to make it to the White House, he would find it very hard to do anything much about globalization — not because it’s technically or economically impossible, but because the moment he looked into actually tearing up existing trade agreements the diplomatic, foreign-policy costs would be overwhelmingly obvious. ... Trump might actually do it, but only as part of a reign of destruction on many fronts.

But it is fair to say that the case for more trade agreements — including TPP, which hasn’t happened yet — is very, very weak. And if a progressive makes it to the White House, he or she should devote no political capital whatsoever to such things.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/a-protectionist-moment/?_r=0

[BernieforPres2016]

4. Krugman is intellectually dishonest; he will do endless backflips to defend himself

and his favored political candidates.

Now he's claiming that sending somebody's $20 an hour job overseas to a $1 per hour worker would have been OK if the government had taxed the employer on the extra profit from it and redistributed the tax back to the worker so he or she could sit at home?

Many years ago (during the GWB administration), Krugman wrote a column about how Toyota put a new manufacturing plant in Canada because Americans were so undereducated that Toyota wouldn't build plants in the U.S. anymore. I sent him an email pointing out 3 or 4 relatively new plants that Toyota or one of its subsidiary suppliers had opened in the U.S.

No response from Krugman to the email, of course. He had his thesis to peddle and facts weren't going to get in the way of it.

[pampango]

5. I disagree that your opinion of Krugman. He is liberal and intellectually honest

and he hates republicans and conservative/austerity economists.

I rather think his point is rather that progressive leaders like FDR and Truman and progressive countries like Sweden, Germany or Canada do not live in fear of the $1 an hour worker. In modern America, Mr. Trump seems to have cornered the market on fear of Mexican, Muslim and Chinese workers as the great destroyers of America. I don't think Democrats will be able to out-Trump Trump or campaign as Trump-lite candidates.

I think Krugman understands what FDR and Truman understood in their day and what Sweden, Germany and Canada (among other progressive countries) understand today. That is that governments that govern progressively - legal support for strong unions, high and progressive taxes, effective business regulation and good safety nets - will have strong middle classes.

FDR and Truman were not afraid of $0.10 an hour (perhaps what a modern $1 an hour worker would have been earning in the 1940's) workers in poor countries. Mexico and China signed the ITO agreement and would have been members. Progressive countries today are not afraid of $1 an hour workers.

Perhaps FDR and Truman were and Sweden, Germany and Canada are fools to believe that their countries can be prosperous and progressive in a globalized world that includes a lot of very poor people. But so far, they don't seem to understand that what they are doing is 'impossible' in the minds of many.

Where is the trade issue most contentious? In the most regressive country among all the 'developed' countries. And the country that trades less than anyone else, roughly 1/2 to 1/3 as much as more progressive countries. It's the US - with our 'right-to-work' laws that weaken and destroy unions, with regressive taxes and repeated tax cuts for the rich, with deregulation and underfunding of regulatory bodies and with a shredded safety net - that loves to blame our problems on our relatively small amount of trade.

Trump's response? Don't worry about weak unions (he'll make them weaker), regressive taxes (you ain't seen nothing yet), deregulation (climate change is a hoax) and a shredded safety net. He will make American great again by going after the $1 an hour workers in poor countries. Progressives in other countries probably understand that he is a RW populist so he values populist rhetoric over learning from history. That's what RW populists do. They might be surprised that many others who are not RW populists are also convinced that walling off poor workers in other countries is the solution to our problems.

[BernieforPres2016]

6. Right, it's all Democrats versus Republicans

All Democrats good, all Republicans bad. And Paul Krugman is intellectually honest, despite all the lies and half truths I've seen him spout over the years. Got it.

Welcome to ignore.

[pampango]

7. No, it's all FDR Democrats versus republicans and New Democrats.

Do you put everyone whom you disagree with on ignore? You must have an impressive list.

[Faux pas]

2. K N R-ed