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.
You've got your terms backwards. So-called “fair-trade” is just a socialist invention for managed trade designed specifically for wealth redistribution. Free trade (I will agree that we have never achieved this ideal — because of the vestiges of protectionism in every real-world trade deal) creates wealth, by allowing nations to concentrate on what they do best. The benefits of free trade is the one thing that (almost all) economists — from Adam Smith onward — agree upon.
a global market buchanan and liberals want to destroy
Unless we supply 100% of our oil and ban international trade in oil, US oil prices will be determined by global energy markets. Of course if we did only buy domestic oil, our energy prices would have to be much higher than the world prices.
That is why I told him to try bigger BOO's.
and if buchanan had his way, we wouldn’t be able to buy anything not made in America
Didn't Buchanan get into political trouble for driving a Mercedes?
But my statement stands, NAFTA was sold on the ideal it could be renegotiated and it will not kill anyone to renegotiate it.
is there a solid reason to renegotiate it? It is a problem to renegotiate just for the sake of messing around
Yes and no. Yes he owned a mercedes, but questions about buchanan go much deeper than his car. I never read his statement. My statement was about NAFTA in general, I don't understand the fear of a redo!
Back when we made everything we needed in this country, was that such a bad thing?
"sake of messing around" that is way beyond my eduction, what is the definition for sake of messing around??
People treat the concepts of Free Trade and Protectionism too much like religion and too little like the pragmatic tools they should be.
Free Trade is only universaly good if you run a multi-national corporation and protectionism is only universaly desirable if your a union boss.
For most of the rest of us, we want our nation to be economicaly competitive and we want to have a reasonably good quality of life.
The way to achieve that is a smart combination of open trade agreements and strategic, limited protectionism.
Believe it or not, there are instances when protectionism can enhance long term economic competitiveness not stifle it (for instance when an industry suffers a momentery crisis or when trying grow a new industry sector that’s not quite upto competing with the rest of the world from birth.... but could be if given a little space and breathing room to grow before facing competition, or buffering resources from the results of an overly volatile market).
I post this because IMO, this is where the real problems lie.
The Fed is nothing more than a group of the richest banking families in the world who manipulate the world economy at their pleasure. They caused the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent world depression and made a fortune doing it.
“The Council on Foreign Relations was incorporated as the American branch in New York on July 29, 1921. Founding members included Colonel House, and “...such potentates of international banking as J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Paul Warburg, Otto Kahn, and Jacob Schiff...the same clique which had engineered the establishment of the Federal Reserve System,” NAFTA, Open Borders, cheap labor are all ideas hatched within CFR. Funny how the top frontrunners for POTUS are either members or married to members of that organization.
That is one of the silliest things I have ever heard. What are the Canadians going to do with their electricity, put it in a bottle and sell it on the world market. LOL
So long as California, for instance, refuses to do anything to meet its own energy needs, there will be a market. Hydro electricity in Canada is generated by Crown Corporations — and, therefore, our domestic prices for electricity are far lower than market prices. Electricity prices have barely risen, while the world price of oil has more than quintupled. Under NAFTA, electricity is sold into the U.S. market at the Canadian domestic price. Based on the cost of alternative sources of power, the actual market price would be far more. By “market” price, I mean the price at which a willing buyer is willing to buy from a willing seller.
Here's another consideration — NAFTA started life as the Canada-US FTA, during Reagan's term. Bush Sr. started the expansion to NAFTA, and did most of the heavy lifting. W. J. Clinton sealed the deal on NAFTA — despite the same objections from within the Democrat Party as you're seeing today.
During the CAFTA, and then the NAFTA negotiations, Canadian trade opponents (AKA: socialists, “nationalists”, “environmentalists”, and anti-American moonbats) warned us of dealing with “sharp Yankee traders”. They warned that there was no way that Canadians could win anything from such Yankee traders as Reagan and Bush.
Do you really think that Reagan and Bush were pushovers? Or that their negotiators weren't some of the sharpest “Yankee traders” walking the planet? Do you think that they missed something you would have noticed?
IMHO, I think that NAFTA was a reasonable agreement at the time. Chapter 6, the Energy chapter, seemed to be a fair price to pay. That was then — the difference now is that we have more than ten times the known oil reserves, and over three times the exports that we did when NAFTA was signed. If anything, Chapter 6 has become far more valuable to the U.S. That's fine by me — because I think that freer trade benefits everyone, and because I don't mind seeing Americans benefit too. I also think that a deal’s a deal.
When you add in the current geopolitical situation; you can only conclude that Reagan was a farsighted genius to negotiate such an energy-security deal for the U.S. — when the future benefits were no where as clear as they are now.
Whatever you have pointed out is bunk, first it was oil, well oil is a free world market and because of no transportation cost Canada is getting a honey of a deal. As to electrical supply, if Canada dose not want to sell it to the united states at market they are free to ship it to mars.(as a hint to you, there is no one else they can sell their electricity to) And to say that Canada will raise the price is nothing but blackmail.
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