President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I don't drink the big corporate "microbrews" much. The Coors Killian's Red was about the only exception to that, and I no longer drink that much. It used to cost close to what the regular big brewery beers did, but now it's like $7.99. For a buck or two more I can get a legit micro red or brown ale that's a lot better. I'll either drink corporate on price, maybe Yuengling, or I'll pay more and get something decent. I don't drink much any more, so I tend to pay for the taste I prefer.

 

The losses do not offset gains in service economy industries or medical service industries, for example. There’s a new, ginormous medical plaza everywhere you look that come into some interesting times in 15/20 years. There’s more nail salons, more Instagram stars, more pharma sales of painkillers.

 

Please please please hold it in the Crimean city of Yalta, so American media are forced to use the dateline:

YALTA, Russia ---

 

Drain the swamp (or a 3 from downtown!)!

 

And even assuming that’s true, how exactly is it that you know that this relates to NAFTA, specifically, not general advances in technology, transportation, and productivity?

 

NAFTA’s Economic Impact

Both sides of the argument:

Critics of the deal, however, argue that it is to blame for job losses and wage stagnation in the United States, driven by low-wage competition, companies moving production to Mexico to lower costs, and a widening trade deficit. The U.S.-Mexico trade balance swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus in 1993 to a $54 billion deficit by 2014. Economists like the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s (CEPR) Dean Baker and the Economic Policy Institute argue that this surge of imports caused the loss of up to 600,000 U.S. jobs over two decades, though they admit that some of this import growth would likely have happened even without NAFTA.

Many workers and labor leaders point to these numbers to blame trade, including NAFTA, for the decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs. The U.S. auto sector lost some 350,000 jobs since 1994—a third of the industry—while Mexican auto sector employment spiked from 120,000 to 550,000 workers. CEPR’s Baker argues that econometric research shows that increased trade also puts downward pressure on wages for non-college educated workers, who are more likely to face direct competition from low-wage workers in Mexico.

But other economists like Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Cathleen Cimino-Isaacs of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) emphasize that increased trade produces gains for the overall U.S. economy. Some jobs are lost due to imports, but others are created, and consumers benefit significantly from the falling prices and often improved quality of goods created by import competition. A 2014 PIIE study of NAFTA’s effects found that about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to the pact—but that for each of those jobs lost, the economy gains roughly $450,000 in the form of higher productivity and lower consumer prices.

Many economists also assert that the recent troubles of U.S. manufacturing have little to do with NAFTA, arguing that manufacturing in the United States was under stress decades before the treaty. Research by David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson published in January 2016 found [PDF] that competition with China had a much bigger negative impact on U.S. jobs since 2001, when China joined the WTO. Hanson, an economist and trade expert at the University of California, San Diego, says that the steepest decline in manufacturing jobs, which fell from seventeen million to eleven million between 2000 and 2010, is mostly attributable to trade with China and underlying technological changes. “China is at the top of the list in terms of the employment impacts that we found since 2000, with technology second, and NAFTA far less important,” he says.

In fact, says Hanson, NAFTA helped the U.S. auto sector compete with China. By contributing to the development of cross-border supply chains, NAFTA lowered costs, increased productivity, and improved U.S. competitiveness. This meant shedding some jobs in the United States as positions moved to Mexico, he argues, but without the pact, even more would have otherwise been lost. “Because Mexico is so close, you can have a regional industry cluster where goods can go back and forth. The manufacturing industries in the three countries can be very integrated,” he says. These sort of linkages, which have given U.S. automakers an advantage in relation to China, would be much more difficult without NAFTA’s tariff reductions and protections for intellectual property.

 

Economist Jeffrey Sachs:

"Maybe Donald Trump really is the Manchurian Candidate, a stooge of some foreign potentate. Much more likely, Trump is just mentally unstable and narcissistic. Whichever it is, Trump is rapidly destroying American global leadership, alliances, and interest......

....... Across Europe, there was not a single word of respect for Trump. The constant refrain was extreme puzzlement and deep consternation. How did America fall so far so fast?"

Trump's insane trade war (opinion) - CNN

 

Breaking from GOP orthodoxy, Trump increasingly deciding winners and losers in the economy

add tariffs to breakup free trade and reward inefficient businesses, higher interest rates due to sever deficit spending and trump and his supporters are merely anti-capitalist socialists

 

#BeBest

 

Jonah Goldberg on the "Deep State". Strange times when I start invoking him, but I think this is dead on.

‘Deep State’ Today: Like Communism in McCarthy Era, but Less Serious | National Review