Thanks to free trade agreements, our country has lost 13.6 million jobs.
It was 1993, and our new President Bill Clinton had inherited trade agreements negotiated by George H.W. Bush and his USTR Carla Hills. First up for debate in Congress would be NAFTA, and the Uruguay Round of GATT/WTO would come the next year. In general, the vast majority of republicans and their big money fat cats on Wall Street and in the Fortune 500 boardrooms were huge supporters. The majority of Democrats, most of whom were concerned about the potential for massive middle class job exports and downward pressure on wages, were against these new agreements.
That fall, I got into it with a Reagan/Bush loving Econ professor about NAFTA. He had every bullet point down pat….. The Tide of Free Trade lifts all boats, we can't put a wall up around the country, Globalization is here, etc., etc.. We agreed to disagree and moved on, but he said something that came back to haunt him when we met again years later. During that original exchange, he stated that NAFTA would significantly reduce our trade deficit by billions of dollars a year, and each one billion dollars in deficits equals 1,700 jobs lost in the good ole' USA. NAFTA eventually ended up dramatically increasing our trade deficit with Mexico and Canada by over 100 billion dollars a year.
Since we started this rush to embrace free trade and globalization during the Reagan years, the USA has run up almost 8 trillion dollars in trade deficits. Using that republican Econ professor's stat the each billion costs the USA 1,700 lost jobs that means we have lost 13.6 million jobs due to NAFTA, GATT/WTO, CAFTA, MFN, and all the others. I wonder if they ever found a nice, slick way to back track from that little stat they were throwing out back in the day?
Its really hard to pin down the exact number of jobs lost because so many spin-off and support jobs are lost months or years later after the initial closing of a factory. When corporations saw all the labor savings from the factory job exodus, then they started shipping customer support, electrical engineering, computer programming, technical support, and other types of jobs out of the country. I know three electrical engineers that had their jobs shipped to China just a few years ago, and various studies show that workers who lose jobs to free trade and outsourcing end up making about 25% less than in their original job, that is if they can even find a job. Oh, and let us not forget those still working in the US and the pressure to work longer hours for lower wages or else their jobs to will be shipped out of the country.
I'm all for fair and free trade, but we ain't seen anything fair about our so called "free trade" agreements in many moons. In reality, they are nothing more than outsourcing/investment agreements for the 1% that are masquerading as free trade.
= new reply since forum marked as read
The argument against NAFTA basically seems to consist of holding your ears and pretending the mid and late 1990s didn't happen.
That employment rate looks pretty good until W fucked it up. (Unemployment is now back down to 1994 levels.)
Ditto that median income. Note that even Bush's disastrous mishandling of the economy couldn't wipe out the median income gains after NAFTA.
The bottom quintile's income gains were not statistically significant, and welfare "reform" made this problem worse. But, yes, the other 80% of America is making more money in real dollars today than they were in 1993.
Your charts and stats have been totally debunked in the past.
No, they haven't. People saying "but the factory in my town closed down" isn't debunking. You actually can't "debunk" a fact, for that matter.
You can say (people seem to) that lower unemployment and higher median income aren't what you care about, but there's no getting around the fact that both happened.
NAFTA took a few years before the negative effects started kicking in.
How many manufacturing jobs did Mexico add since 1994? And how many did China add? Which of those countries do we have a free trade agreement with?
Aligned to that: how did manufacturing in Canada (also a NAFTA partner) fare?
that happened since NAFTA's formation in 1994
Can you really persuade yourself that the red vertical line was the problem here?
*U.S. real (inflation adjusted) median household income was $51,939 in 2013 versus $51,759 in 2012, statistically unchanged.
*In 2013, real median household income was 8.0 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the latest recession.
*Real median household income averaged $50,781 from 1964-2013, ranging from a low of $43,558 in 1967 to a high of $56,895 in 1999.
Commenting on the Census Bureau report, economist Ben Casselman wrote that U.S. median household income was "...9 percent lower than at its peak in 1999, and essentially unchanged since the end of the Reagan administration." The recovery from the 2007-2009 recession had not translated into higher incomes for the typical American family.
Measured relative to GDP, total compensation and its component wages and salaries have been declining since 1970.
This indicates a shift in income from labor (persons who derive income from hourly wages and salaries) to capital (persons who derive income via ownership of businesses, land and assets).
Extreme poverty in the United States, meaning households living on less than $2 per day before government benefits, more than doubled from 636,000 to 1.46 million households (including 2.8 million children) between 1996 and 2011.
While the median household income had increased 30% from 1990 to 2006, it has increased only slightly when considering inflation.[21] In 1990, the median annual household income was $30,056 or $44,603 in 2003 dollars.
While personal income has remained relatively stagnant over the past few decades, household income has risen due to the rising percentage of households with two or more income earners. Between 1999 and 2004 household income stagnated showing a slight increase since 2004.
Households in the top 1% experienced the by far greatest increases in household income.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
