Tuesday, February 17, 2015 6:02:20 AM
shtsqsh, imo bulldzr is right, NAFTA is not so black and white either. This is a nice,
easy and uncomplicated pro and con. I've tossed in a few of the comments too.
NAFTA: Time for a Trade-in
The North American Free Trade Agreement has taken too many U.S. jobs away from the Rust Belt. Pro or con?
Pro: So Many NAFTA Casualties
by Bill Fletcher Jr., BlackCommentator.com
The most conservative estimates indicate that NAFTA has cost the U.S. a minimum of 525,000 manufacturing jobs, and some estimates range as high as 766,030. These jobs have not been replaced by other manufacturing opportunities. In general, those who have lost employment as a result of NAFTA, as well as the roughly 3 million workers who have lost manufacturing jobs during the post-1994 period, have “migrated” into lower-wage employment in the service sector.
Ross Perot famously talked about a “giant sucking sound” of jobs moving from the U.S. to Mexico, but the picture has been more complicated than that. Mexico has suffered severely from NAFTA with the depression of its agricultural sector—its products couldn’t compete with cheap foodstuffs from the U.S.—leading to a mass relocation of rural residents into cities and later to the U.S. The combination of documented and undocumented immigrants has served as a ready-made low-wage pool for avaricious U.S. employers seeking to cut costs and increase profits. In addition, and ironically, employers that did relocate to Mexico from the U.S. and Canada have now begun an exodus, moving to even lower-wage areas such as China and Vietnam.
What the NAFTA experience really points to is that steps such as NAFTA, allegedly taken to “grow the economy,” increasingly benefit a smaller and smaller segment of those societies, including the U.S., that follow a “neo-liberal economic model.” In comparison, little has been gained by those who have lost their jobs (or the communities that shared the benefits of their employment) because of NAFTA.
The time has come for a renegotiated relationship that places the interests of working people and the environment ahead of the corporate bottom line. The same myopia that has our financial markets in meltdown shaped the thinking and objectives behind NAFTA.
Con: NAFTA Opponents Bark up the Wrong Tree
by John Berdell, DePaul University
Rewriting NAFTA is probably going to sound pretty good to the U.S. public these days. How and when the current financial meltdown will be stabilized can only be guessed. One might have hoped the example of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 would have forever poisoned the notion that higher tariffs protect U.S. jobs. Those tariffs were part of the unprecedented downward spiral into joblessness that we wish to preempt now.
Today’s NAFTA-jobs debate is a little like rehearsing Hamlet without the Prince. Since 1995, imports from Mexico have slightly more the doubled, while imports from greater China (China plus Hong Kong and Macao) have more than quadrupled. So the question of how trade affects U.S. jobs and wages is an increasingly Asian issue rather than a Mexican one.
As far as unemployment is concerned, increased labor productivity—rather than trade agreements like NAFTA—ranks as the predominant cause behind the shrinkage of manufacturing employment across the globe. On a percentage basis, Chinese manufacturing jobs actually have contracted far more drastically than U.S. manufacturing jobs, and China certainly has no NAFTA to blame for its situation.
An equitable fiscal reform that removed the unfair burden of health and retirement payments from employers and put it on consumption (via a sales tax) would help U.S. manufacturers facing foreign competition and boost the low rate of U.S. savings that causes our trade deficits. Reform is certainly needed, but reforming NAFTA is a distraction we cannot afford.
Opinions and conclusions expressed in the BusinessWeek Debate Room do not necessarily reflect the views of BusinessWeek, BusinessWeek.com, or The McGraw-Hill Companies.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reader Comments
TomV
September 26, 2008 1:20 AM
The pro arguments always raise is where the heck is the money going to come from to pay for US manufacturing jobs? Let me use an example. Whether it's Miguel in Mexico or Yang in China, a product X is priced $19.99 on the shelf. I'm the consumer and need said product. What the pro side says is, hold it! That product should have been made here in the US! You know, the unionized, hard working, and will strike if you don't give me what I want workers. Now, in their place, I would not blame them for their attitude, but now that same item X on the shelf is $29.99, made by unionized U.S. workers so they can live the American dream. But where am I going to get the extra $10 to buy the now more expensive item X? And the answer is, where the protections and policies pro people want break down. Whether you remove the $19.99 item from the shelves or can persuade people to pay more for the same item, all you do is make life more expensive for everyone else, creating the vicious cycle of needing higher salaries, because guess what, in my job, I make item Y, and you need to buy one. That made in Mexico $25 one the store used to sell is gone, now banned by tariffs, so you get to buy my $35 one because I'm just like you. And where are you getting the extra $10 from? At least we aren't like that $50 one made in Europe where this cycle has already played out for years.
angry old man
September 26, 2008 5:51 AM
I am getting more and more angry at the three words that have flooded the media over the past few weeks. These are "to increase profits." I am getting to hate the word "profit." I hope the elite all die from tainted $700 a bottle wine.
Phil Gramm was Right
September 26, 2008 2:14 PM
We are a nation of whiners. Those Rust Belt jobs were going away long before NAFTA was signed. That they went south of the border or across the Pacific instead of simply disappearing only prolongs the agony of industrial dinosaurs like GM's inevitable demise. Decades of mismanagement, including poor product design, shoddy craftmanship, and yes, overpaying blue collar labor, are taking their toll. The sooner they're gone, the better.
Steve
September 26, 2008 3:56 PM
Nobody stops to think that NAFTA has very little at all to do with American businesses making manufacturing investments outside of the U.S., namely in Mexico.
American, and other, manufacturers had moved and were moving to Mexico to access low cost labor for almost 30 years prior to the NAFTA being signed. With or without the NAFTA, this can and continue.
The NAFTA is, in essence, a tax reduction treaty (import taxes). The biggest effect that the NAFTA had at the time of its signing was psychological. Manufacturers saw increased viability in Mexico due to the U.S. government's willingness to engage in such a treaty with that country.
NAFTA, in and of itself, has very little to do with the issue of industry migration.
those pretty well cover much of the picture i think, more comments here ..
http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2008/09/nafta_time_for_a_trade-in.html
---
This one fills the universal picture of 'loss of manufacturing jobs' frame a bit more and sheds more light on
the loss of those in the USA, of course. Nowhere near is it all, maybe even not much at all, to do with NAFTA.
Why Factory Jobs Are Shrinking Everywhere
By Charles Kenny April 28, 2014
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-04-28/why-factory-jobs-are-shrinking-everywhere
See also:
Again though Clinton presided over the longest economic expansion in history, balanced the books and created 24 million jobs. W squandered that. $2 trillion
in tax cuts, $ trillions in wars and who knows what on the Medicare part D plan, that forced the government to pay retail prices for meds.
.. some pertinent NAFTA fact in there, too .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=96425749
In that last there are yet another 6 reasons of why any, even if only implied, or indirect, or even unintentional implication of any solid, real
equivalence at all between Clinton and Bush, or Bush and Obama, will inevitably .. lol .. bring a gush of concerned and well meant information
to the two eyes of the one who makes such of any comparison, as you did. Ouch that's a lousily looong sentence. It can be a testing time for some.
easy and uncomplicated pro and con. I've tossed in a few of the comments too.
NAFTA: Time for a Trade-in
The North American Free Trade Agreement has taken too many U.S. jobs away from the Rust Belt. Pro or con?
Pro: So Many NAFTA Casualties
by Bill Fletcher Jr., BlackCommentator.com
The most conservative estimates indicate that NAFTA has cost the U.S. a minimum of 525,000 manufacturing jobs, and some estimates range as high as 766,030. These jobs have not been replaced by other manufacturing opportunities. In general, those who have lost employment as a result of NAFTA, as well as the roughly 3 million workers who have lost manufacturing jobs during the post-1994 period, have “migrated” into lower-wage employment in the service sector.
Ross Perot famously talked about a “giant sucking sound” of jobs moving from the U.S. to Mexico, but the picture has been more complicated than that. Mexico has suffered severely from NAFTA with the depression of its agricultural sector—its products couldn’t compete with cheap foodstuffs from the U.S.—leading to a mass relocation of rural residents into cities and later to the U.S. The combination of documented and undocumented immigrants has served as a ready-made low-wage pool for avaricious U.S. employers seeking to cut costs and increase profits. In addition, and ironically, employers that did relocate to Mexico from the U.S. and Canada have now begun an exodus, moving to even lower-wage areas such as China and Vietnam.
What the NAFTA experience really points to is that steps such as NAFTA, allegedly taken to “grow the economy,” increasingly benefit a smaller and smaller segment of those societies, including the U.S., that follow a “neo-liberal economic model.” In comparison, little has been gained by those who have lost their jobs (or the communities that shared the benefits of their employment) because of NAFTA.
The time has come for a renegotiated relationship that places the interests of working people and the environment ahead of the corporate bottom line. The same myopia that has our financial markets in meltdown shaped the thinking and objectives behind NAFTA.
Con: NAFTA Opponents Bark up the Wrong Tree
by John Berdell, DePaul University
Rewriting NAFTA is probably going to sound pretty good to the U.S. public these days. How and when the current financial meltdown will be stabilized can only be guessed. One might have hoped the example of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 would have forever poisoned the notion that higher tariffs protect U.S. jobs. Those tariffs were part of the unprecedented downward spiral into joblessness that we wish to preempt now.
Today’s NAFTA-jobs debate is a little like rehearsing Hamlet without the Prince. Since 1995, imports from Mexico have slightly more the doubled, while imports from greater China (China plus Hong Kong and Macao) have more than quadrupled. So the question of how trade affects U.S. jobs and wages is an increasingly Asian issue rather than a Mexican one.
As far as unemployment is concerned, increased labor productivity—rather than trade agreements like NAFTA—ranks as the predominant cause behind the shrinkage of manufacturing employment across the globe. On a percentage basis, Chinese manufacturing jobs actually have contracted far more drastically than U.S. manufacturing jobs, and China certainly has no NAFTA to blame for its situation.
An equitable fiscal reform that removed the unfair burden of health and retirement payments from employers and put it on consumption (via a sales tax) would help U.S. manufacturers facing foreign competition and boost the low rate of U.S. savings that causes our trade deficits. Reform is certainly needed, but reforming NAFTA is a distraction we cannot afford.
Opinions and conclusions expressed in the BusinessWeek Debate Room do not necessarily reflect the views of BusinessWeek, BusinessWeek.com, or The McGraw-Hill Companies.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reader Comments
TomV
September 26, 2008 1:20 AM
The pro arguments always raise is where the heck is the money going to come from to pay for US manufacturing jobs? Let me use an example. Whether it's Miguel in Mexico or Yang in China, a product X is priced $19.99 on the shelf. I'm the consumer and need said product. What the pro side says is, hold it! That product should have been made here in the US! You know, the unionized, hard working, and will strike if you don't give me what I want workers. Now, in their place, I would not blame them for their attitude, but now that same item X on the shelf is $29.99, made by unionized U.S. workers so they can live the American dream. But where am I going to get the extra $10 to buy the now more expensive item X? And the answer is, where the protections and policies pro people want break down. Whether you remove the $19.99 item from the shelves or can persuade people to pay more for the same item, all you do is make life more expensive for everyone else, creating the vicious cycle of needing higher salaries, because guess what, in my job, I make item Y, and you need to buy one. That made in Mexico $25 one the store used to sell is gone, now banned by tariffs, so you get to buy my $35 one because I'm just like you. And where are you getting the extra $10 from? At least we aren't like that $50 one made in Europe where this cycle has already played out for years.
angry old man
September 26, 2008 5:51 AM
I am getting more and more angry at the three words that have flooded the media over the past few weeks. These are "to increase profits." I am getting to hate the word "profit." I hope the elite all die from tainted $700 a bottle wine.
Phil Gramm was Right
September 26, 2008 2:14 PM
We are a nation of whiners. Those Rust Belt jobs were going away long before NAFTA was signed. That they went south of the border or across the Pacific instead of simply disappearing only prolongs the agony of industrial dinosaurs like GM's inevitable demise. Decades of mismanagement, including poor product design, shoddy craftmanship, and yes, overpaying blue collar labor, are taking their toll. The sooner they're gone, the better.
Steve
September 26, 2008 3:56 PM
Nobody stops to think that NAFTA has very little at all to do with American businesses making manufacturing investments outside of the U.S., namely in Mexico.
American, and other, manufacturers had moved and were moving to Mexico to access low cost labor for almost 30 years prior to the NAFTA being signed. With or without the NAFTA, this can and continue.
The NAFTA is, in essence, a tax reduction treaty (import taxes). The biggest effect that the NAFTA had at the time of its signing was psychological. Manufacturers saw increased viability in Mexico due to the U.S. government's willingness to engage in such a treaty with that country.
NAFTA, in and of itself, has very little to do with the issue of industry migration.
those pretty well cover much of the picture i think, more comments here ..
http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2008/09/nafta_time_for_a_trade-in.html
---
This one fills the universal picture of 'loss of manufacturing jobs' frame a bit more and sheds more light on
the loss of those in the USA, of course. Nowhere near is it all, maybe even not much at all, to do with NAFTA.
Why Factory Jobs Are Shrinking Everywhere
By Charles Kenny April 28, 2014
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-04-28/why-factory-jobs-are-shrinking-everywhere
See also:
Again though Clinton presided over the longest economic expansion in history, balanced the books and created 24 million jobs. W squandered that. $2 trillion
in tax cuts, $ trillions in wars and who knows what on the Medicare part D plan, that forced the government to pay retail prices for meds.
.. some pertinent NAFTA fact in there, too .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=96425749
In that last there are yet another 6 reasons of why any, even if only implied, or indirect, or even unintentional implication of any solid, real
equivalence at all between Clinton and Bush, or Bush and Obama, will inevitably .. lol .. bring a gush of concerned and well meant information
to the two eyes of the one who makes such of any comparison, as you did. Ouch that's a lousily looong sentence. It can be a testing time for some.
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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