There’s no problem with Trump asking trading partners to reconsider certain aspects of existing and future trade partnerships. I don’t understand the position that says the United States has to shrug and accept trade pacts that are clearly disadvantageous to American labor. So I disagree with Trump’s critics at least on those grounds.
The problem I have with Trump is that whatever solution he’s proposing is most likely populist gimmickry, and rather than actually searching for modest improvements in trade, he’s using the grand stage of the presidency to put on some kind of political shit show. Worse, I don’t think there’s anyone within earshot of him who can provide competent advice on how to tweak these treaties. Trump’s agenda seems to be have the United States take a time machine back to the early 20th Century.
Some country, or perhaps several, will fill the void left by the United States.
Here’s the problem we were running into: Presidents consider foreign policy as well as economic policy. TPP was more of a geopolitics thing than an economics thing. and in that respect, it’s awesome. But the public decided that it wasn’t worth the potential job losses.
Guess what - Australia already has trade agreements with both the USandChina. So, yeah, losing the TPP does not in any way mean that we’re hiding behind a giant protectionist fence. Trade already happens, lots of it.
I mean that, in principle, renegotiating deals like NAFTA and further negotiating TPP isn’t problematic. Nor is there anything wrong with making sure that these agreements are as advantageous as possible to America’s labor force. The United States doesn’t have to accept that international trade necessarily means whopping trade imbalances.
If the United States would have a socioeconomic protection plan that essentially bail out the American worker and help him (her) retrain at minimal cost, this might not be as great a concern as it is now. The corporate elitists wanted to sell America on global trade but gave little afterthought to the plight of those displaced. Now they’re left to deal with Trump, as we all are.
The problem with bailouts of workers is that they are also unpopular. People want their jobs and there’s just no substitute for that.
I’ve always been in favor of free trade, still am, but the backlash by the voters has taught me to respect their will and understand it. Too many actors abused the process. “Hey, we have a free trade deal with poor country X, I think we’ll pack this factory up, fire all the workers, and move it down there. All of us executives will of course not only keep our jobs, but we’ll get massive raises!”
If free trade had just increased competition, that would have been dandy. In cars, it has. We have American companies that make cars, japanese companies that make cars, China’s about to enter our auto market, there’s European cars, etc. It could well be that American car companies will die off, but if they do, it will be because of global competition. By contrast, when all the companies in an industry decide to just pack up and go overseas to save money on labor and pocket the profits, that’s not competition. At least not the kind we signed up for.
I don’t really care about the US economy. I’m Canadian, and I saw no up-side to Canada to sign on for this deal. IMO, it probably would have been good for the US as a whole in the long term, really really good for the top 10% of the US, and shit for those on the bottom. So in relative terms, it depends on how you value raw economic growth compared to how big a problem you think wealth inequality is on whether it was “bad” or not.
So you were incredulous about countries making free trade deals with china because it’s implied they don’t buy stuff. But in fact Australia has many trade deals with China already and exports $80 billion worth of goods each year (that’s 1/3 of all Australian exports and 8 times as much as they export to the USA).
Yes China buys stuff. They buy more cars than the US, by a pretty big margin, for example (yes I know Australia is not a major car exporter, it’s just an illustration of china as a major purchasing power, not just the world’s sweatshop).
Whether it’s strategically better for Australia to try to sell to the US, is more a matter of opinion, but the chinese market is already comparable in size to the US by many metrics, and is growing. It’s ludicrous to suggest the only reason that Australia would pretend to sign a deal with China is a bluff.
I was wrong about that. I’m just skeptical that it’s good policy for Australia. Maybe Australia is just so small compared to China that they can’t help but to export more to China than import? I would still think Australian manufacturers would want to go to China if there’s no tariff.
Upthread we see a suggestion that bilateral agreements are better than multilateral agreements. This ignores that trade is not generally bilateral. For example:
[ul][li]Vietnam send electrical equipment to Chile[/li][li]Chile sends copper ore to Canada[/li][li]Canada sends lumber to Japan[/li][li]Japan sends nuclear reactors to Vietnam[/ul][/li]Thus it does make sense for multiple countries to cooperate. The scope of an N-country trade agreement is supralinear!
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I did realize you were Canadian. But the implicit thread tropic is the utility of TPP for the U.S.A. If your example was intended to support that utility, you phrased poorly. Indeed in the post I excerpted, you used this (advantage to the U.S.) to conclude that Trump “shocked” you by doing something wise. :smack:
[Moderating]
If you do not wish to discuss the policies of a country’s government, don’t participate in threads obviously meant for that purpose.
No warning issued but this brushes up against a number of rules, including threadshitting, being a jerk, and personal insults, to name three, so be more circumspect or take it to the Pit.
Trump campaigned against the TPP, had nothing to offer other TPP members, even specifically dumping on Canada (where his facts were wrong) and Mexico (over and over again), and left the TPP to others to lead in their own interests.
He reduced our military presence in SE Asia trade routes, and allowed a foreign nation to announce that the US is going to negotiate face to face with North Korea, with no plan, and the US foreign policy expert on Korea making a point by resigning.
He opened a trade war with China by promising to throw his midwest farmer support under the bus as his opening salvo!
NOW, he appears to realize he’s pretty much screwed up everything he’s touched in the entire Pacific hemisphere, so maybe (just maybe) he wants the TPP back!!
This is just one more example of how well this president thinks things through.
But the implicit thread tropic is the utility of TPP for the U.S.A. If your example was intended to support that utility, you phrased poorly. Indeed in the post I excerpted, you used this (advantage to the U.S.) to conclude that Trump “shocked” you by doing something wise. :smack: