Politically speaking, there was no debate on United States international trade agreements in 2016: All politicians seeking to win a national election, or even to create a party-spanning political coalition, agree that our trade agreements are bad things.
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From the left, we had Democratic presidential primary runner-up Bernie Sanders — and a remarkably close runner-up he was — slamming trade. From the — I do not think it’s wrong but it’s not quite correct to call it “right,” at least not as Americans have hitherto understood what “right” is — but from somewhere, we had now-President Donald Trump. Listen to them: The rhetoric is the same.
It goes like this: The jobs America wants to have — the good jobs, the manufacturing jobs — have gone. First came NAFTA, in 1993. Then there was China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which granted China a normal country's freedom to export to other countries, and obligations to accept imports from other countries. Finally, there was the not-yet-implemented (and, as of this week, officially dead) Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Such agreements will leave, or have left, "millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache” (Trump), have "lost [us] … manufacturing jobs” (Trump), and created “catastrophe” (Trump). The agreements amount to "the death blow for American manufacturing” (Sanders), they “undermine our independence” (Trump), and they "forced American workers to compete against desperate and low-wage labor around the world” (Sanders), all while causing "massive job losses in the United States and the shutting down of tens of thousands of factories” (Sanders).
And what did we hear from the center establishment? We had popular vote–winning (but Electoral College–losing) Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton. She stated: “I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I oppose it now, I’ll oppose it after the election, and I’ll oppose it as president. …”
The rhetoric of all three candidates resonates with the criticism of trade agreements that we heard way back when NAFTA was on the table as a proposal — not, as today, something to blame all our current economic woes on. The independent Ross Perot and Republican insurgent Pat Buchanan claimed NAFTA would produce "a giant sucking sound [of jobs] going south” (Perot), that we’ve “wrecked the country with these kinds of deals” (Perot), that the deal added up to “anti-freedom, 1,200 pages of rules, regulations, laws, fines, commissions — plus side agreements — setting up no fewer than 49 new bureaucracies” (Buchanan).
The political truthiness has been flying thick and fast on this subject for decades now. Politicians are taking claims that have a very tenuous connection to economic reality — claims that feel true — and running with them, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes because of cynical calculation.
Trump and Sanders were apocalyptic in their discussions of trade, and then Clinton abandoned the truth, too
Clinton was clearly the candidate whose policy claims, as a whole, had the best empirical support, so her surrender to truthy proclamations about trade was especially galling. Her advisers and experts, I am certain, did not believe the TPP would kill jobs or hold down wages, although they may have been aware of some of the technocratic economic complaints about the TPP.
Those complaints, which with I sympathize, were twofold. First, that the TPP would have given US owners of intellectual property too much of a whip hand in their extraction of economic rents from people in poorer countries. It would have made them pay through the nose for research and development that had already been done, and had already been paid for out of profits earned in the US. Second, it set in stone rules for judging whether governments were treating companies fairly. We do want a trading system in which companies exporting and investing have confidence that they will not be specifically discriminated against by governments, but the form such rules should take are very delicate. It’s not wise to set them in stone before we see how they work.
The general agreement among those who analyzed the TPP, however, was that it was on the whole very profitable for the US: Yes, it made poor foreigners pay through the nose for intellectual property. But it was definitely not a job killer for the US, or a wage suppressor. And insofar as those who profited from the TPP then turned around and employed workers in the US, which to a great extent they would have, it would have been a wage and job booster.
But for the purposes of the HRC campaign, a job killer and a wage suppressor it had to be. And so it became.
But the truthiness on the subject of trade agreements was flying even thicker and faster from the others, from Sanders last spring, from Trump — and, again, earlier, from Perot and Buchanan.
Yes, America has been losing manufacturing job share at a furious rate. Yes, the spread between the incomes of the non-college-educated and the college-educated has widened massively. Yes, the spread between the incomes of even the college-educated and our overclass has exploded.
But this is not due to NAFTA. This is not due to bringing China into the WTO rather than keeping it out. This is not due to the not-yet-completed — and now never-to-be-completed — TPP.
Read more
http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/24/14363148/trade-deals-nafta-wto-china-job-loss-trump
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