Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

ForReal, Your fact-free, feel-good positions look little more than misguided justifications for your not having the courage to question your long-held political cynicism. Sure there are valid criticisms to be made about most everything and everyone, but to hold on to positions which fly in the face of accepted fact (by most experts in any particular field) is not helpful to anyone, much less helpful to you.

For one your NAFTA-jobs position is simply wrong.

[2015] 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

[...]

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=110922792

A recent one

Sanders overshoots on NAFTA job losses
[...]
Our ruling
Sanders said that NAFTA, which Clinton used to support, cost the U.S. economy 800,000 jobs. There is a report from a left-leaning policy group that reached that conclusion. On the other hand, many other nonpartisan reports found that the trade deal produced neither significant job losses nor job gains. This is a result of competing economic models and the challenges of teasing out the effects of NAFTA from everything else that has taken place in the economy.
P - The report Sanders cited is an outlier, and his use of its findings ignores important facts that would give a different impression. We rate his statement Mostly False.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=152900371

See also:

US tariffs to hit trans-Pacific imports hardest in 2020
"Tariffs could cost American households $2,400 each in 2019, a new study warns"
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=145155086

hookrider! Trump is repeating the isolationism that led to the Great Depression and WWII
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=131381441