I think a reply / debunk on all those points would take us very far from the OP.
For the purpose of this thread I dispute the summary of most of these points, and even the one or two which I think are fair, are nothing to the brazen lies trump says week in week out. He has no respect for the intelligence of his supporters.
So would it benefit the United States to wall off the poorer states, or the inner cities, and not engage in trade with those areas?
Does it benefit a rich person to refuse to do business with people who aren’t as rich? Is Bill Gates made worse off by buying his coffee from a barista making $9 an hour at Starbucks? Why would you think that doing business with a person who is poorer than you would make you poor?
Why are you cutting off your analysis in 1997, 2005,m or 2004? I would guess it’s because the period from 2001 to 2005 was very flat:
I can pick and choose my numbers, too - the unemployment rate has been as low as 5.6 percent since the FTA, just before the Great Recession. The number of Canadians living in poverty is steadily dropping. By any measure the number of people living under the low income cutoff is going down. I think you missed the point I was addressing, which is this; if expanding the size of the labour pool is a threat to workers, the unemployment rate should not be seven percent, it should be something like 37 percent as a result of FTA and NAFTA.
Can Canada do an even better job of spreading the wealth and helping the poor? Of course we can, but we’re not going to do it by exiting from trade deals. A more responsive and flexible education system, solid health care, a social safety net that addresses the needs of a changing population, fixing the disgrace of the way our aboriginal people are treated - these things are not easily repaired but they can be repaired in a world of free trade. Aboriginal poverty is not Mexico’s fault.
As to the dispute resolution system under NAFTA, you say:
Well, maybe Canada should stop doing discriminatory things. But really, $170 million in 25 years to maintain access to the biggest market in the world? That’s a bargain. If you’d gone to the Canadian government in 1988 and said “the U.S. will drop almost all remaining tariffs in exchange for about seven million bucks a year, just sign here” they’d have been scrambling to find a pen. Tax revenue gained from the added export business alone is a huge multiple of that.
As you yourself admit, NAFTA allows for legal action is a government discriminates against an agent on the basis of their nation of origin (assuming they’re from Canada, Mexico, or the USA.) It does not simply offer reimbursement for lost profits or “put profits ahead of environmental concerns.” If that were true, there’d be no laws left at all about pollution; all environmental laws cost someone profit, so all would have been sued out of existence long ago. Canada beyond any reaosnable doubt or question has far more stringent environmental protection laws, on the whole, than it did in 1988 or 1993, so how an that be? What you can’t do is pass a law that appears to be designed to favour your country’s investors over the other’s.
The case of MMT is, rather unsurprisingly, quite a bit more complex than “Canada wanted to ban a neurotoxin but it but into Ethyl’s profits.” Well, actually, they did not try to ban MMT… they tries mto prohibit it from being imported or moved from one province to another. You could still make and sell it, actually. Health Canada reported they could find no evidence MMT caused a health risk, so when the law was passed it was done in the absence of evidence there was a reason for it - it was a purely political act that affected only an American firm and left alone Canadian manufacturers of competing gasoline additives. It was actually crafted in such a way that Ethyl Corp could have continued producing MMT as long as they built a plant to make it in every province; the law banned import and inter-provincial transport, *but not manufacturing and sale. * It was stupidly written law. Of course, the case was settled for five cents on the dollar, so it’s not like Ethyl Corporation took the government to the cleaners.
I’m not going to pretend the FTA/NAFTA is perfect, because of course it isn’t. But how many trade disputes and costs would we have without it? What would the situation be in its absence? We’d have ten times as many problems - except instead of going to arbitration, countries would just raise a tariff or pass some sort of punitive legislation.
I notice the TPP supporters seem to be ignoring the major non-trade problems with the TPP, like allowing corporations to ignore environmental regulations and extending copyright even further. Whether the base trade treaty is a good idea (and I don’t think it is), there is a lot of really awful stuff bundled in. What’s especially confusing is that it’s stuff that should bother progressives, like removing environmental safeguards and increasing copyright issues, but the people arguing that it’s absolutely unarguably stupid to axe the treaty seem to be on the progressive side of the fence.
This is the last thing I’m going to post on this particular digression in this thread, but the honesty level of “Well of course she lies about her position on major issues, and routinely goes back on campaign promises to the point that we think you’re dumb if you try to argue that she supported leaving the TPP even though that was a campaign promises, we just don’t count that as dishonesty” doesn’t seem all that different from “Well of course he makes big sweeping promises, you’re dumb if you think he wants to do everything he said to get elected, we just don’t count that as dishonesty.” When your candidate is so fundamentally dishonest that you sneer at people who point out that she promised to kill the TPP when campaigning as idiots for pointing it out, it’s really hard to take ‘honesty’ or ‘liar’ arguments seriously.
None of the things you put in quotes are things I said, nor fair paraphrasings.
Yes I think she was dishonest on that issue. But it’s a question of degree here. She’s widely labelled as a liar and “crooked hillary” by the right, and there just isn’t enough there to justify that. She hasn’t been dishonest any more than any other politician whereas Donald trump has. Fact.
Jobs in Canada went from factory jobs to service jobs, full time to part time, with benefits to without, with pensions to without. Canada is a sound economy with good relationships, trade will not dry up without trade deals!
The point comes down to, the citizens overwhelmingly DON’T want it. Here, in the US, in Europe. And their governments are supposed to listen to them. NOT elitestly ignore their wishes.
I don’t know why this is necessarily bad. A doctor is a service job. Teachers are services jobs. Why are service jobs bad?
This is completely false. The percentage of Canadians employed full time hasn’t actually changed at all over the years. It goes up and down a little when there are recessions and booms, but it’s a very consistent number.
If you’re not even proceeding from an assumption base of facts I don’t know what else to say or if there’s any point in proceeding with discussion. I can’t argue against someone’s feelings.
That’s my stance, and I resolve to use the phrase “bilnd squirrel moment” more in my day to day life.
Because the article I was citing from was written in 2006. I’m not cherry picking, and I am open to you citing some updated numbers, if you have something more recent.
The numbers do clearly indicate that the huge bulk of the increased trade in the decade following NAFTA only seemed to benefit the top 10%, while actively harming the bottom 20%. Do you dispute that?
I already cited a chart of the Canadian unemployment rate in my post. The lowest I see on my cite is 6.0% during 2007, so I’m going to need a cite on that 5.6% you are claiming.
Please consult this graph I found on Wikipedia, which shows the persons in low income measure. It has not been steadily dropping, and went from 10% in 1989 to 16% in 1996.
This one admittedly gets muddy, as LICO and low income measure data are not strictly measurements of poverty, and Stats Canada has been reluctant to define poverty. But again, do you have a cite for your claim? 5 minutes on Wikipedia can prove that is has not dropped “by any measure.”
I disagree. I have yet to see any evidence that trade deals help the poor. I have cited evidence that it helps the rich.
This part I agree with, right up to the part I snipped.
Yes, but in Canada it’s 50 years after the death of the creator, not 70. So it would have extended copyright by 20 years in Canada. I personally think even 50 years is far too long, so I’m even less impressed by 70.
I have nothing positive to say about NAFTA’s investor-state dispute settlement mechanism, which is also in the TPP. (And is usually what people are going on about when they claim the TPP will kill the environment.) You can defend them if you want. My thoughts if you do so can’t be expressed anywhere but the pit, so I’ll just leave this one alone.
I’m not saying this stuff is always easy to find, but you should at least be a littel cautious about just stopping at a point ten or twelve years ago, shouldn’t you?
To use the example of Canadians under LICO, and I concede it’s maddeningly hard to find,. but just pushing it ahead by five years to 2011, the number drops from 10.3$ of Canadians to 8.8%, which is a substantial decline. In fact that was the lowest it had ever been as long as they’ve bneen measuring it (which is back to the 60s.)
As you’ve provided no evidence to support the claim, there’s nothing to dispute. You say it’s the same because rich people are getting richer, but rich people can get richer by raising trade barriers - Donald Trump’s new Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, is a billionaire example.
Unemployment numbers are issued monthly, not annually. Simply doodling up the chart from any decent source and looking at the line shows it dipped below six percent prior to the fiscal crisis of 2008.
If you think 70 is worse than 50 fair enough. I’m not sure the aggregate impact to society for “Firestarter” not hitting the public domain until 70 years after Stephen King dies, instead of 50, really matters a great deal.
That would certainly explain why after 29 years of free trade with the USA. we no longer have any laws protecting the environment… no wait, *reality is totally the opposite of that.
*
When my point is to look at the aftereffects of NAFTA, the decade following it seemed an appropriate period to look at.
Let’s move those goalposts! First, you claimed “By any measure the number of people living under the low income cutoff is going down.” Now you have to clarify that’s only true for the time period you cherry-picked. The facts stand that the unemployment rate went up immediately following NAFTA, and didn’t return to the pre-NAFTA rate for 8 years.
That is flat-out wrong. By your own cite it was 2.9% in June of 1966.
That was a terrible way to admit you were also completely wrong about the length of Canadian copyright. If you can’t even admit that, I’m done wasting my time here.
Trump killing TPP is a good move in that it’s what he promised to do, and he did it. Politicians have run against trade deals in the past, but when the chips were down, didn’t deliver.
But it’s bad policy. One reason Presidents haven’t walked the walk on trade is because trade is not just an economic deal, it’s a foreign policy tool. TPP would have brought those nations closer to us. Now they will get closer to China.
But in the end, the decision on whether to prioritize American jobs or geopolitics is for the people to make, and they made it. 97% of voters voted for an anti-TPP candidate. It doesn’t get clearer than that.
Yes. Absolutely yes. Before the election I warned that a Trump Presidency would hand power to America’s enemies. It begins. "Australia’s prime minister suggests China could replace U.S. in TPP"
Trump ran with the slogan “Make America Great Again” but killing TPP will weaken America and strengthen its rivals.
Whatever its faults, the Obama Administration has pursued good foreign policies; people in the know think Obama’s global agenda is one of the smartest of any President. It is so very very sad to see this thrown away, for no reason except the disgust that this First Family was eating watermelons or fried chicken.
I agree with most of asahi’s post, except that Trump’s sole ideology — anti-trade — has been very visible all along. That and his (related but largely hypocritical) anti-immigration stance is the ignorant populist agenda which got him elected
Cite? The TPP was a complicated thorough pact, so of course there will be details that can be nitpicked. But I’ve no idea which “special interest” you’re so concerned with unless it’s American business interests. The pact was intended to strengthen the international copyright agreements that help American companies like Pfizer and Disney. Liberals may not be fans of that, but conservatives should be … and so should everyone who wants to see America “great again.” Note that increasing the foreign profits of American companies is generally good for the American consumer.
And liberals who don’t want trade agreements to turn foreign countries into oppressive sweat shops should have been delighted with TPP. Another of the “special interests” Steve MB complains of is the environment and safety of Vietnam’s workers.
I’m not a fan of the hyper-capitalist rents flowing to Disney and Pfizer. But let’s make up our minds. Was TPP bad because it hurt America’s economy or because it strengthened it? :smack:
Well, one thing Australia said is complete baloney. Countries don’t want to make free trade deals with China, they want to make them with the US, because we buy stuff. Australia’s threat is utter nonsense, nor will democratic Australia go into China’s orbit, either economically or politically.
It’s just sour grapes because Australia saw all kinds of GDP growth and new jobs from free trade with the US.
Actually, a president probably can get impeached for doing a horrible job. The removal of the president is essentially a political process, not a legal one. Just as the president can violate almost any law he wants until congress finally puts its foot down. That’s why the lawsuits against over the emoluments clause won’t be able to remove him from office - at least not with the current congress. However, that’s not to say that they’re pointless as they could lay down the constitutional foundation to have him removed once a more hostile congress takes over in two years.
It’s doubtless hot air to say China could “replace the US in the TPP” - because why would they want to?
The rest of your post, however, does not mesh with the facts. China is twice as close to Australia as the US, and our trade relationship with them is worth twice as much as with the US cite
You might have noticed already that Australia has been reluctant to follow the US in confronting China eg over the South China Sea. They’re a big regional power and we’re IN the region that they’re a power over. They’re eight times as rich as us and fifty times as populous. We like the US and all, but you guys are a long way away.
Still not mourning the TPP death, because of the investor-state dispute issue which still exists in the final text, though it looks like former leaked clauses that might have threatened the PBS haven’t made it into the final version. What the other partner countries think about it, I don’t know.
China doesn’t buy stuff? :dubious:
FTR China is already Australia’s largest import and export market.
To those of us that understand that trade is much more than just rich country buying goods made by poor country that’s not at all surprising. Indeed to those of us who live in China, and see how popular Western goods are (and goods made by many other countries e.g. Japanese products), it’s not surprising.
But it doesn’t sit well with whatever point you are trying to make.
Cite? The TPP was a complicated thorough pact, so of course there will be details that can be nitpicked. But I’ve no idea which “special interest” you’re so concerned with unless it’s American business interests. The pact was intended to strengthen the international copyright agreements that help American companies like Pfizer and Disney. Liberals may not be fans of that, but conservatives should be … and so should everyone who wants to see America “great again.” Note that increasing the foreign profits of American companies is generally good for the American consumer.