Doublespeak from Daschle on Trade Adjustment Assistance

Trade Alert ^ | 4/2/02 | Alan Tonelson

[madeinchina]

Give Tom Daschle this much: Even in a city of spinners and parsers, the Senate Majority Leader is uniquely difficult to understand. He's attacked President Bush for cutting taxes too much, yet would not repeal the cuts. One day he questions the President's anti-terrorism strategy as lacking "a clear direction." Another day he's wholeheartedly on board.

But none of the South Dakota Democrat's positions is more confusing than his stance on granting the president fast track trade negotiating authority.

Throughout his career, and especially during the Clinton years, Daschle strongly supported the fruits of past fast track bills - the kind of NAFTA-like trade agreements that helped keep American wages in recession despite a strong economic expansion. No surprise there.

After all, legislators from agricultural states like South Dakota generally accept the globalization cheerleaders' line uncritically - even though the U.S. agriculture trade surplus has shrunk by nearly 20 percent over the last decade of breakneck trade liberalization. Daschle has taken great pains to identify with the Democratic Party's business-friendly, soccer-mom wing. And like all Democratic presidential hopefuls, Daschle knows that candidates hostile to NAFTA-style free trade quickly run out of money.

Under a Republican president, Daschle, like many other Democratic moderates, has started questioning carefully selected aspects of current globalization policies. In particular, he has shed some crocodile tears over fired workers while glomming on to what can only be called the Guilt-ridden Globalists' phony cure-all - a set of education and welfare programs collectively called Trade Adjustment Assistance.

But even if the most sweeping, lavishly funded Trade Adjustment Assistance program really could turn laid-off auto or steel or textile workers into computer network engineers (and not a shred of evidence indicates that it can), Daschle's sudden obsession with the human and economic costs of globalization is simply baffling. In fact, anyone taking seriously his recent statements on trade policy has to wonder how he can even imagine a downside to globalization to begin with.

In pressing the president to attached a souped up version of the TAA program to the fast track bill, Daschle argues that expanded trade "inevitably" leaves certain workers behind. He faults current TAA programs for covering "too few people." And he charges that they fail to "address some of the most serious problems displaced workers have in finding productive new employment." Yet however widespread these views are (especially among Congressional Democrats desperate for fig leafs to cover pro-fast track votes), they make no sense whatever given Daschle's broader views on trade and globalization.

According to the Senate Majority Leader, U.S. exports already are supporting one-tenth of all American jobs at pay rates much higher than the national average. (His numbers are highly misleading, but that's the subject for another column.) NAFTA and the Uruguay Round world trade agreement, Daschle claims, have handed the average American family major savings on consumer purchases. And the future looks even brighter.

In Daschle's view, "no nation in the world is better positioned" than the United States "to thrive in a global, information-based economy" and "expanded trade will create billions and billions of dollars in economic growth" for America.

So with all these benefits already being created, and all this growth certain for the future, why do so many more workers need government help of any kind? Why are so many displaced workers having such trouble finding "productive new employment" on their own? Why should assistance actually be expanded to cover "all workers who are hurt by global production shifts," not simply those victimized by NAFTA? Why do "people who work for the suppliers and contractors of trade-affected companies," along with farmers, need coverage, too? And why on earth should we even be talking about insuring these workers "against wage loss when they become re-employed"?

Why won't the national economy best-positioned for globalization do all of this naturally? Why won't the "billions and billions" of dollars of growth predicted by Daschle absorb all or nearly all of the displaced workers by itself? After all, the American economy achieved record low unemployment during the "Clinton boom" without a massive TAA program. Unless Daschle believes that the new trade agreements that the administration says it plans to pursue with fast track authority are deeply flawed, why does Daschle assume that so many of the new jobs created by trade-fueled growth will pay so badly that wage insurance is needed?

And if significant numbers of Americans lack "the new skills they need to earn a living," why assume that trade agreements are to blame? In fact, why connect job training and education to trade legislation in the first place?

The real answer to all these questions lies in Daschle's prediction that "it will be impossible to build a broad consensus for expanded trade unless we do it right." Translation from Daschle-speak: "Most Americans hate these NAFTA-style trade policies. But our multinational corporate funders demand them, so we need to fool and buy off voters with promises of welfare." It's not Churchillian. Or even Rooseveltian. But if it helps put Tom Daschle in the White House, or even keeps him Majority Leader, it will have served its main purpose.

[madeinchina]

Another in the twist and turns of trade policy's effect on the US.