Your donations make In These Times affordable for all readers, including students and readers with low incomes. Please donate today.

Hope in the Time of NAFTA

By David Sirota

Reading articles about Hillary Clinton attacking NAFTA can lead you to believe The Onion has taken over America’s news bureaus. Clinton spent the last 10 years repeatedly praising the trade deal in speeches, most recently calling the job-killing accord “good for New York and America.” Yet, journalists barely mention that record as they transcribe her assertions that, “I have been… return to article

  • subscribe to print magazine

  • Zoom OutZoom In Reader Comments (3)

    Page 1 of 1 pages

    This week on C-SPAN Senator Byron Dorgan, (D) S.D., was advocating allowing the Consumer Protection Agency to ban imports from those companies which have repeatedly sent us dangerous products.

    We’ve heard how only 1% of foreign goods are inspected, but until now I had no idea that there is no one empowered to stop this stuff from coming in.

    He mentioned one Matel supplier in China caused three product recalls in five weeks — and there is NO WAY to cut them off.

    Our country is suffering from terminal silliness.

    United States Posted by whattheheck on Mar 7, 2008 at 1:30 PM

    Hope in the Time of NAFTA?

    Hope?  You sound like that vacuous idiot running for president.  A few facts are much more to the point than all the hopes of Osama, Obama, and Bonnie and Clod.

    NAFTA passed in 1993, sponsored by Republicans and endorsed by President Clinton and some Democrats in Congress, and, more particularly, by Clinton’s wife on numerous occasions.  Economists, the people who study markets, jobs, and economic growth, are virtually unanimous that free trade improves everyone’s economic well-being in the aggregate.  Manufacturing employment rose for five years after NAFTA, stabilized for two years, and only started down in Clinton’s last year in office, the same year that NASDAQ lost $3 trillion, half its total value.  Employment reductions frequently follow market drops. 

    Manufacturing employment has declined from 17.2 million to 14.8 million since NAFTA.  The value of manufactures has increased by 66% during this time frame.  That means that individual manufacturing productivity has increased by 80% since NAFTA passed.  Overall civilian employment has grown from 121.5 million at the end of 1993 to just over 146 million at the end of 2007.  So, while dramatic increases in productivity have reduced the need for manufacturing workers, there is no shortage of high-paying jobs available.  These figures certainly do not indicate that NAFTA is a cause of job loss, when individual workers produce nine units of economic output in 2007, when they only produced five units of economic output in 1993.

    In a post-industrial society such as ours, industry must and should play a smaller role, as higher-paying high-tech, medical, and financial jobs expand.  The Demonicrat argument that all these medium-paying manufacturing jobs go to “burger-flippers” is false; even burger-flipping shows a degree of productivity improvement, meaning that there is no great residual demand for fast food workers when manufacturing productivity limits manufacturing jobs. 

    We have been through this cycle many times.  In the early years of our new nation, over 95% of the population was engaged in agriculture.  Now it is less than 3%.  What happened to all the ex-farmers, did they starve off?  Well, no, they went to better paying manufacturing jobs.  One hundred years ago the saddle makers and buggy whip manufacturers were hurting, but they didn’t starve either; auto mechanics pays better than equine accessory craftsmanship. 

    So, given HillBilly’s past support for NAFTA and Goolsbee’s documented denial that Obama was serious about renegotiating NAFTA, this whole conversation about NAFTA is absurd, as well as being dishonest, on the part of both parties.  But these are Demonicrats, after all. 

    The most delicious aspect of this teacup tempest is Hillary’s attack on Obama.  When was the last time a little old white lady attacked a young black thug?  I love it.

    United States Posted by scorp on Mar 9, 2008 at 12:11 PM

    “...this whole conversation about NAFTA is absurd, as well as being dishonest”

    Yes, as is yours.

    Go out into the real world of people who have been adversely affected by the economic changes of the past 14 years. Perhaps the greatest problem today is the willingness to accept as fact the numbers which are fed to us each day.

    Your data and arguments you presented above are irrelevant and unrealistic.

    The switch from agricultural to industrial took place over generations — globalization and outsourcing in a click of a computer key.

    The productivity data ignores subassemblies produced in cheap labor markets and installed here, or even worse a minimum amount of assembly in the U.S. in order to “justify” a Made in the USA label.

    Try to imagine yourself at between 45 and 65 — kids in college or about to be, a house you can’t sell, picking up the health care costs for a family of 3 or more, only able to find part time work and unable to afford to travel very far for an interview (tickets are too costly).

    Even before the subprime mess when a major manufacturer left town the housing market was over crowded. There are homes for sale here on the market for two years by people who did leave due to transfer or job loss.

    We can agree on this:
    Clinton is twisting her own history and Obama knows he cannot or will not fix this problem.

    But both parties are going to perpetuate it either knowingly or because they accept the same data which you do.

    We are now being advised to continue spending devalued dollars to buy things we didn’t make from people who don’t care about the safety of their customers. We are being forced to commute more to jobs which pay less and using more gas we don’t produce. We are counting the productivity additions and GDP gains in what is being spent in foreign countries.

    This was not so 95 years ago.

    United States Posted by whattheheck on Mar 12, 2008 at 8:25 AM
    Page 1 of 1 pages

  • register a new account »Posting Security

    To participate in our forums, please register for a free account.
     

    Retreive lost password »

Popular Discussions