Plan for superhighway ripped as 'urban legend'

Worldnetdaily.com ^ | January 26, 2007 | Jerome Corsi

[Toddsterpatriot]

People demand that the government provide essentials and some luxuries that their jobs won't afford them.

Doesn't mean the government will provide them. Unless you know something about big screens that I don't?

As jobs pay less

Link?

And the more jobs move out,

Link?

the more YOU'LL be soaked for the difference, if you're in the socioeconomic class I think you're in.

Which class is that?

And the rest of us will have to suffer under cancerous government, spreading everywhere to fill in the gaps.

Allow me to amend my original comment, Pay more for your stuff. For smaller government!!

[mysterio]

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

[eleni121]

It will hurt most port cities and small time truckers!

---

You mean those port cities like at Long Beach CA when thsoe "patriotic" longshoremen went on strike at the worst possible time in Autumn of 2002 disrupting the economy? Estimates put this effect at about $20 billion, even though President Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act after ten days.

Or are you talking about truckers --- you know those whose union officials appeal to racist and chauvinist sentiments. A statement on the union’s web site slanders Mexican drivers as potential criminals and says opening the border would “make it easier for traffickers to smuggle illegal drugs into the US.”

What a laugh since the teamsters are guilty of the worst kind of accidents and "drug driving" of anybody!

[Toddsterpatriot]

What, no ridiculous exaggeration? No unsourced assertion? I'm deeply saddened.

So what socioeconomic class am I in?

[mysterio]

NAFTA and Workers' Rights and Jobs The central focus of pro-NAFTA campaigning was the issue of U.S. job creation, so it is fair to measure NAFTA's real-life results against its backers' expansive promises of hundreds of thousands of new, high-paying U.S. jobs. However, even measured against the more lenient "do no harm" standard, NAFTA has been a failure. Using trade flow data to calculate job loss under NAFTA (incorporating exactly the formula used by NAFTA's backers to predict 200,000 per year NAFTA job creation) yields net job destruction numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Whether the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs qualifies as "a giant sucking sound" depends on the ear of the listener. It is clear, however, that NAFTA has indisputably led to widespread job loss, with over 412,177 U.S. workers certified as NAFTA casualties under just one narrow government program. The fact that job growth totally unrelated to NAFTA has produced a net gain in U.S. employment during this period in no way changes the reality that NAFTA has cost large numbers of individual workers their jobs,­ most of whom are now unemployed or working at jobs that pay less than the ones they lost.

The U.S. economy created jobs at a fairly rapid rate in the 1990s, but without NAFTA, hundreds of thousands of full time, high wage, benefit-paying manufacturing jobs would not have been lost. It is also important to note that while the U.S. economy is generating substantial numbers of new jobs in absolute terms, the quality of the jobs created is often poor. The U.S. Department of Labor projects that the professions with the greatest expected future growth in the U.S. are cashiers, waiters and waitresses, janitors and retail clerks. These and other lower-wage service jobs are the kind that will most likely be available to workers displaced by NAFTA. Economic surveys of dislocated workers shows that the jobs lost to NAFTA, in many cases high-paying manufacturing jobs, are, in the majority of cases, replaced by lower-paid employment. NAFTA also has had a negative effect on the wages of many Americans whose jobs have not been relocated but whose wage bargaining power with their employers is substantially lessened; NAFTA puts them in direct competition with skilled, educated Mexican workers who work for a dollar or two an hour ­or less. NAFTA was supposed to ameliorate this problem by raising Mexican living standards and wages. Instead, both have plummeted, harming the economic prospects for workers on both sides of the border.

link

[mysterio]

Boy, NAFTA is sure helping Mexico, too. I guess your cheap stuff is causing the rush across our border. Man, your cheap stuff is even more expensive than I first thought.

[Toddsterpatriot]

I'm sorry, did that Public Citizen (hehe) source prove that American wages are dropping? Did it prove that if only we bought more expensive goods, wages would be rising instead of falling? Because that seemed to be your earlier claim, but I just didn't see it in that Public Citizen (hehe) link.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Boy, NAFTA is sure helping Mexico, too.

While that is an interesting chart, what does Mexico's dysfunctional government and economy have to do with more expensive goods being better for your children or better for our smaller government?

[deport]

It will hurt most port cities and small time truckers!

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Port cities... When the Panama Canal widening is completed Houston and the rest of the Texas Ports most likely will see increases. Now them 'small time truckers' I don't know. But when all is said and done they will need highways to handle the incoming both goods and people influx.

I think I read an article just a few days ago on FR about the major growth in the China port facilities to handle container exports and new facilities were being built on the Pacific Coast to off load them... I-10, I-40 corridors and others may be next to get major upgrades.

I guess if the people of the US would just not buy those goods coming in via those importers and then businesses could only warehouse so much before they'd decide not to bring anymore in. But my guess the public is not going to give up shopping at the major retailers like Walmart, Target, etc.

[mysterio]

Amazing how their government went "dysfunctional" right as Nafta passed. What an incredible coincidence.

[mysterio]

Did it prove that if only we bought more expensive goods, wages would be rising instead of falling?

Nah, no correlation there. The $3 I saved on that hammer is certainly worth America absorbing millions of illegal immigrants fleeing the great things NAFTA has done for their country.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Amazing how their government went "dysfunctional" right as Nafta passed. What an incredible coincidence.

Their government was dysfunctional long before NAFTA. Do you have a point in there somewhere?

[Toddsterpatriot]

The $3 I saved on that hammer is certainly worth America absorbing millions of illegal immigrants fleeing the great things NAFTA has done for their country.

Tell you what, take the hammer and build a border wall. Then find a better excuse for your desire for more expensive goods.

I wonder if you think we should just use US oil and gasoline? It might cost us $200 a barrel, would it be worth it? We wouldn't have to let any of that money go to nasty Canadians or Mexicans. What do you think?

[Paul Ross]

And more blasts from the past...

"We have them surrounded in their tanks"

"The American press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!"

"I have detailed information about the situation...which completely proves that what they allege are illusions . . . They lie every day."

Why does this sound so much like our Commerce Dept.?

[mysterio]

Do you have a point in there somewhere?

Yeah, it's the point marked "1994" on the chart I posted above.

[mysterio]

Tell you what, take the hammer and build a border wall. Then find a better excuse for your desire for more expensive goods.

No, I think we should fine the corporations that hire illegals $100k per day per incident. I bet you then they'd make pretty sure their workers were legit.

I wonder if you think we should just use US oil and gasoline? It might cost us $200 a barrel, would it be worth it? We wouldn't have to let any of that money go to nasty Canadians or Mexicans. What do you think?

I think we should research every alternative fuel extensively and set up a 10 year plan to achieve near total energy independence. Personally, I'd like to see a lot of nuclear power plants pushed through and a biodeisel ramp up while we research converting cars to hydrogen.

Or conversely, we could just collect all of the hot air that gets tossed around during these NAFTA vs tariff debates and make electricity from that. lol.

[Toddsterpatriot]

If you knew anything about economics or markets, you'd know what happened in 1994.

[Toddsterpatriot]

No, I think we should fine the corporations that hire illegals $100k per day per incident. I bet you then they'd make pretty sure their workers were legit.

Sounds good to me. Then what will be your reason to whine about cheap goods?

I think we should research every alternative fuel extensively and set up a 10 year plan to achieve near total energy independence.

So is that a yes to $200 oil?

Or conversely, we could just collect all of the hot air that gets tossed around during these NAFTA vs tariff debates and make electricity from that.

If ignorance were wings, you could fly.

[mysterio]

Well, NAFTA was supposed to turn that country around. Guess not. but it paid off double for those who lobbied for it : dirt cheap labor in Mexico, and the added benefit of an exodus of cheap labor into the states. Whoopitydoo.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Well, NAFTA was supposed to turn that country around.

Did it increase trade?