[expat_panama]

fwiw, current official policy at greatagain.gov is now just what the author says, that we don’t want to leave NAFTA but rather update it. Mexico’s president has already publicly signed on.

[gogeo]

President-elect Donald Trump's stance on trade deals assumes unbalanced international trade agreements are domestic job killers.

They are.

What's his point?

[boycott]

Not a jobs killer for Mexico.

[boycott]

Not a jobs killer for Mexico.

[HarleyD]

When NAFTA was finalized more than two decades ago, Ross Perot infamously predicted it would create "a giant sucking sound" of jobs leaving for Mexico.

And then what happened???

[JonPreston]

But the oil share of our goods deficit with Canada and Mexico has declined under NAFTA – from 77 percent in 1993 to 53 percent in 2013. And the non-oil deficit with Canada and Mexico has multiplied more than 13-fold since NAFTA. After removing oil, gas and petroleum products, we still have a NAFTA goods trade deficit of more than $82 billion.

[Freedom of Speech Wins]

In theory NAFTA probably theorized ethical companies, in practice though it is a different story. Bad ethics on the part of companies and NAFTA equals disaster.

[nathanbedford]

As we emerge from the campaign and move closer to actually dealing with trade issues, we begin to see there is more than one side to the story.

Trade is almost never a pure win-win situation. Inevitably, the deal itself favors one segment of our economy at the risk to other segments of the economy. It should not be surprising that consumers benefited from cheaper goods and foodstuffs while some manufacturing concerns were adversely affected. Some agricultural producers were harmed while others prospered in a newly created market. Drivers enjoyed cheaper gasoline prices while automobile manufacturers suffered. Some automobile suppliers prospered while others were harmed.

The point? Sweeping generalizations about trade deals are demagogic and the only way to intelligently deal with the matter is to get deep into the weeds and make everything transparent because ultimately the economics become political issues. In a representative democracy, we expect that the people shall have a voice in the matter the disposition of which should not be left to elitist minority to negotiate a fait accompli for the rest of us, whether by way of an omnibus healthcare bill or a take it or leave it trade package.

Economics becomes politics when we regard the macro scale of trade. On the one hand there is the obvious need to protect the status of the country as a leading manufacturer in the world and generator of technology, or to watch the country slip into degraded status. In other words, it is a political question whether we engage in mercantilism.

On the other hand there is an obvious danger in a top-down managed economy examples of which we have seen over and over ultimately fail. We need only consider our own history in the Great Depression and all of the top-down nostrums imposed on the economy by elitists who only prolonged the misery. We look at the Soviet Union, we look at Japan and we see in the latter case a nation that in the 1970s we thought was destined to master the world become the victim of its own sclerosis. We look at China today and we see the upside numbers of extraordinary growth but we do not necessarily see the internal corruption and decay which might well lead to a very hard landing.

The question of the degree to which we will manage the economy from the top down in the name of trade is one which should be honestly debated, and it was not in the last election. To overstate the matter, we heard only one side of the story, loss of manufacturing jobs, but we did not equally hear the upside to global trade.

If we are to manage trade according to the results of the last election, we should ask ourselves who should manage it, whether the executive or legislative, or both, and upon what principles? For whose benefit? And how will the people be informed of the consequences? We should make an informed decision as a nation about how much we are willing to risk loss of liberty and corruption through the crony capitalism associated with a top-down managed economy and how much we are willing to risk national decay if we take no action.

[Robert DeLong]

There is always someone who is willing to point out the positives, while totally ignoring the negatives.

So let's move to the bottom line to give a more accurate assessment.

I would say that any business that continues to lose money year after year will eventually be out of business.

When the country as a whole experiences a trade deficit year after year, and in the process also loses jobs and factories, then it can reasonably be concluded that the trade deal they are involved is not good for the country as a whole.

[trebb]

The same guy was probably telling folks that the Market would tank if trump won....I’ve read a lot of these financial “wizards’” articles and they seem to be upset that some of the imbalances are heading out the door - must be a way to leverage them at the expense of the Middle Class Taxpayers....

[spintreebob]

Has someone Catalogued in detail what has increased and what has decreased jobs...and if those jobs are high or low paying?

When an American Company invests in Mexico how many jobs under static analysis? How many jobs under dynamic analysis?

When Cemex and Bimbo and other Mexican companies invested in the USA, how many jobs under static analysis? How many jobs under dyanmic analysis?

Re: Dynamic Analysis. It the investment caused the total company to grow then the amount of growth needs to be considered. If the investment (or non-investment) caused the total company to shrink than the shrinkage needs to be considered.

The Rubin factor: Months after Bill signed NAFTA, Treasury Secretary Rubin destroyed the Mexican peso and Mexican Maquiladora investments and drove the Maquiladoras from Mexico to Asia due solely to exchange rates manipulated by Rubin.

That destruction of Maquiladoras in Mexico created the massive increase in immigrants from Mexico to the US in the later Clinton and in the Bush years.

That one unilateral act of Rubin had bigger impact than all of NAFTA.

The consequences of that unilateral act of Rubin caused the Chicago style Democrat-PRI party to lose to PAN’s libertarian leaning globalist Fox for president of Mexico. The first time PRI lost since the election.

Fox’s libertarian leaning 6 years led to him being followed by the Social Conservative president Calderon (think a religious law and order Guliani-Santorum). With hundreds of thousands of Mexicans dying in Calderon’s war on drugs, PAN lost the next election back to the Chicago-Corrution style Democrat-PRI.

Each of these political events had far more impact than NAFTA.

[Mr. Jeeves]

All I know is that Canada hates the loss of tariff revenue from NAFTA so much that they make it very difficult for small (read: non-politically connected) American manufacturers to export there. I've heard cases of the Canadian government levying giant fines and back tariffs on US companies if even one tiny part of their product was found to be sourced outside the USA - something almost impossible to avoid in today's economy.

I know for a fact the US government does not treat Canadian imports with partial foreign sourcing the same way.

NAFTA, like most of these agreements, is thousands of pages of special favors for companies big enough to own and operate their own politicians. It's very hard for smaller players to gain any benefits from it.

[zzwhale]

globalist BS.......

[DoodleDawg]

Depends on your point of view. For Carrier workers it’s a job killer. For those who are working because they are manufacturing goods that go to Mexico and Canada it’s a job creator. The question is what is the net effect?

[central_va]

Free Traitors™ want us to turn a blind eye to reality. The de industrialization over the last 30 years of the USA is a disaster. Lost jobs and lost technical know how all to fatten corporate bottom lines and stockholder dividends. The consumer saw very little benefit, lower quality goods and huge deficits and tax bills.

[Meet the New Boss]

Earth is not a single country.

The premise of those pushing for “free trade” of all goods across all borders is that the Earth should be treated as a single country.

And we have seen over and over again the logic of global free trade is to remove sovereignty and self-government from individual countries and place it at a global level or supranational level.

This is what happened with the European Union. The evolving structures designed to serve free trade eroded the ability of people within their own countries to govern themselves. The British people finally rebelled and demanded the right to govern themselves, and thus Brexit. We may see other countries follow suit.

[NobleFree]

Yet the U.S. runs a NAFTA deficit thanks to imports of fossil fuels and their byproducts, and automobiles. Remove them from the equation, and the U.S. would run a trade surplus with Mexico and Canada.

Remove a few key states and Shrillary won the election. Stoopid.

[CodeToad]

10 paragraphs in and the moron author still hasn’t said why NAFTA is a job creator.