We get cheaper goods and our financial industry profits as well.
It is looking key this - either you learned about the benefits of free trade by studying college level economics or you are doomed to be a protectionist.
Those professors teaching the classes, and the people writing the books had an agenda. The agenda was not ever meant to benefit most people here in the US.
NAFTA needs to be renegotiated or canned.
The salient difference is that the average income goes up but that median income goes down since more people are
“dislocated” as a result of “harmonization” with a third world country labor force. Most of the profits go to the multinationals. The manufacturing jobs as a source of wealth for ordinary people (their labor) are gone to the third world country. Those people have to go back to school and learn a new skill— several years, plus uncertainty. Also, older workers suffer more because after that retraining, they face age discrimination and so are not as likely to be hired at lower rungs of the career ladder, or disqualified due to age (eg armed forces, police, fire). So over time the economy shifts to a service economy— think mccdonalds, motel 6. service jobs are lower paid jobs.
The benefits of tariffs are overlooked in the contemporary economics books. the USA government was financed through tariffs from roughly 1781 to up until the income tax in 1913, which itself probably was not viewed by most as significantly burdensome until after WWII. So protectionism is doomed? If you had been around in 1776, it seems as if you probably would have been a Tory with your anti-tariff bias, yes? After all the nascent USA would have been “doomed” by protectionism, according to your economic gospel. Fortunately you were not around then and the USA did just fine, and your anti-protectionist-doom-prediction “argument” fails by a real life counterexample of our own country.
You should look beyond the GDP and other such agreggates to measures of individual well-being and standard of living.
“Harmonization” can work down as well as up. Are you seriously suggesting that we downwards-harmonize in the direction of Mexico’s labor rates, Mexico’s child labor laws, and Mexico’s environmental pollution laws? —Because that is the economic effect of NAFTA, as measured in median well being.