General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I think this TPP deal might be the beginning of the end of Hillary's Presidential aspirations [View all]MFrohike
(1,980 posts)I'm guessing you still haven't read the edit to my original reply with its estimate of 400k lost jobs to Mexico alone.
This is a bullshit line:
"You're willing to take less in real wages as long as rich people make less too."
No, I'm not willing to kiss a rich man's ass for throwing me the scraps off his table. I didn't say a thing about making rich people less rich. That's all you, chief. My problem is that American workers aren't getting the share of the value they created through their own toil. You might be cool with that, as everything you've written indicates, but I'm not. This is America, Jack. We don't celebrate thievery from the people who actually do the work.
The difference here is that by de-linking productivity and wages, those workers are being paid FAR less then the value they have produced. You may celebrate a rise to just over late 70s levels, but I note that it took 30 years to get there. Why is that important? Our potential GDP has been limited by this trend. The American economy doesn't depend on trade, it depends on internal consumption. The World Bank estimates that exports made up 13.5% of US GDP in 2013. It's not nothing, but it's not 7/8 of GDP either.
Because I don't want to hear it later, I'll point out that the figures for the early 90s have to be taken in the context of the recession that happened in 1991-1992. Income levels were slightly depressed due to that recession, as they always are after a recession, so the gains for the 1995-2010 are slightly skewed from what we'd consider normal. Even so, when you compare the gain to the late 70s, you get a gain of 13.1% over 30 years. That's not much to celebrate. One wonders what it would have been with better distribution of productivity gains and less jobs lost to Mexico and Canada.