Posted on 03/06/2008 1:08:19 PM PST by AllseeingEye33
The Second Battle of NAFTA
By Patrick J. Buchanan
If Canada and Mexico do not renegotiate NAFTA, said Hillary Clinton in the Cleveland debate, she would "opt out" of the trade treaty that was the legislative altarpiece of Bill Clinton's presidency. Barack agreed. NAFTA is renegotiated, or NAFTA is gone.
Barack went further. He has denounced "open trucking," the feature of NAFTA whereby Mexican trucks are to be free to roam the United States and compete with the Teamsters of Jim Hoffa's union, which just endorsed him.
The trade issue is back, big-time. For to blue-collar workers in industrial states like Ohio, NAFTA is a code word for betrayal—a sellout of them and their families to CEOs panting to move production out of the United States to cheap-labor countries like Mexico and China.
Our workers' instincts are backed up by stats. In 2007, the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico soared 16 percent to $73 billion, a record. Mexico now ships more cars to us now than we ship to the world. And where did Mexico get an auto industry?
The U.S. trade deficit with China shot up 10 percent to $256 billion, the largest trade deficit ever between any two countries.
Charles McMillion of MBG Services has run the numbers.
In manufactures, the United States had a trade deficit of $499 billion in 2007, a slight improvement over the $526 billion record in 2006. Yet that trade deficit in manufactured goods with the world is more than twice as large as our $224 billion bill for OPEC's oil.
Under Bush, the U.S. trade deficit has doubled. Three million manufacturing jobs have vanished. And America has begun to run a trade deficit in advanced technology goods of more than $50 billion.
Our trade deficit in advanced technology goods with China is $67 billion, eight times what it is with Japan.
"Free trade is essential to the creation of high-paying quality jobs," said Bush on Thursday. But if exports create jobs (and they do), imports displace them. And if we import half a trillion dollars more in manufactures than we export, is not Bush trade policy literally slaughtering industrial jobs?
Is there not a correlation between $4.3 trillion in trade deficits under Bush, the 3 million manufacturing jobs lost under Bush, the fall of the dollar by 50 percent against the euro under Bush and the resurgence of inflation, signaled by a quadrupling of the price of gold, under Bush?
Neither Hillary nor Obama has laid out a new trade-and-tax policy to deal with the de-industrialization of America and our deepening dependency on foreign technology, manufactures and the loans to pay for them. But at least they are listening to the country.
John McCain seems blind and deaf to the crisis. In Michigan, he informed autoworkers their "jobs are not coming back" and explained his philosophy: "I'm a student of history. Every time the United States has become protectionist ... we've paid a very heavy price."
This is ahistorical nonsense. From 1860 to 1913, the United States was the most protectionist nation on earth and produced the most awesome growth of any nation in history. In 1860, the U.S. economy was half of Britain's; in 1913, more than twice Britain's.
In 1920, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge won a landslide, cut income taxes from Wilson's 69 percent to 25 percent and doubled tariffs. America went on a tear. When Coolidge went home in 1929, the United States was producing 42 percent of the world's manufactured goods.
Who were America's protectionists?
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison moved the Tariff Act of 1789 through Congress. Aided by Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, President Madison enacted the Tariff of 1816 to protect U.S. infant industries from British dumping.
Abraham Lincoln used Morrill Tariff revenue to fight the Civil War. The 11 GOP presidents who followed, from 1865 to 1929, all protectionists, made America the greatest industrial power in history, with a standard of living never before seen. Mocking protectionism, McCain is repudiating Republican history and all its achievements up to the era of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
America rose to power behind a Republican tariff wall. What has free trade wrought? Lost sovereignty. A sinking dollar. A hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing. Stagnant wages. Wives forced into the labor market to maintain the family income. Mass indebtedness to foreign nations, and a deepening dependency on foreign goods and borrowings to pay for them. We have sacrificed our country on the altar of this Moloch, the mythical Global Economy.
It took Rip Van Republican 20 years to wake up to the disaster of open borders and five years to realize the folly of igniting wars in which no vital interest was at risk.
How long before the GOP wakes up to the reality that globalism is not conservatism, never was, but is a pillar of Wilsonian liberalism, in whose vineyards our faux conservatives now daily labor.
Can’t believe no takers on this one.
I don’t get the fear that some people have when you mention “renegotiate NAFTA”, it not going to kill anyone, and the whole barrel of cow dung was sold under the ideal that if it wasn’t working well it could be renegotiated.
He always has.
Buchanan mentions history. He’s clearly no economic historian. The Great Depression was deepened and prolonged by protectionism (world wide). You can’t unilaterally be protectionist — economists call that the “beggar thy neighbour” strategy. The problem is — the neighbours will play the same game.
Where are those *better* jobs? Where are those *higher* wages?
Oh, that's right! People were suppose to drop paying their bills, supporting their families and *retrain*.
So Hillary wants to repudiate the one bright spot of Bill's presidency? Why is it the only the non-right to work states where unions have a strangle hold the only places that are economically declining?
Our *neighbors* are playing the game and they’re cheating to win.
Canadian nationalists, “environmentalists”, and socialists would love to tear up NAFTA — and especially Chapter 6. They — or at least the “environmentalists” would also love to completely shut down the Alberta oil sands — with greater oil reserves than Saudi Arabia's.
You'd better think this through.
Boo, Boo!, Boo!. Have you got anything else!
That 1929 date is rather significant isn't it? That was when the Smoot Hawley tarrif spread a the recession world wide and made the Great Depression an economic and political catastrophe for the whole world. Back when oil was $10 a barrel and Texas was having serious economic problems, you didn't hear about politicians in Washington helping out Texans. McCain is right about this. States have to be competitive with the whole world. Companies aren't going to beat down doors to relocate to non-right to work states like Ohio and Michigan if they don't do anything to reform their labor laws.
And the events of 1929 is a great example of this. Republicans disavowed protectionism after the Great Depression and WWII.
I'm all for *Fair trade Free trade is a codeword for wealth redistribution.
Sorry but, oil is traded through a Global market at Global prices. It’s the same everywhere thanks to Globalization.
fair trade is a code word for government control of the economy
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