2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Why is Hillary going to Flint? They need things done now, and she's not in office. [View all]DanTex
(20,709 posts)There was a study showing that something like 800K jobs were lost to NAFTA. OK. Then I'll see a study that says that some huge number of jobs were created by NAFTA. It's really hard to determine whether those losses and gains were caused by NAFTA, or how much NAFTA is actually responsible for.
What's more, the economy was at or near full employment for many years after NAFTA was passed. And the employment level is more of a function of monetary policy than of specific trade agreements. Lowering interest rates will increase it, at the risk of inflation, and vice versa, trade agreement or not.
There's the argument that with NAFTA, we exchanged well-paying blue collar manufacturing jobs for McJobs in the service sector. That's plausible, but then again the deterioration of manufacturing started before that and would have continued even without it. We definitely have a problem with inequality, and creating better-paying jobs for middle and working-class people, but in my mind the argument that trade agreements are a major part of that isn't entirely convincing.
Maybe I'm wrong. I've read Stiglitz and Reich and other people like that who have a decidedly more negative view towards them than I do. Maybe I should read them again.