Ezra Klein's observations on Trump's trade/NAFTA debate argument [View all]

[yallerdawg]

From: Vox's The press thought Trump’s first 30 minutes were his best. They were his worst.

From the debate, Trump's most "populist" argument:

Our jobs are fleeing the country. They're going to Mexico. They're going to many other countries. You look at what China is doing to our country in terms of making our product. They're devaluing their currency, and there's nobody in our government to fight them. And we have a very good fight. And we have a winning fight. Because they're using our country as a piggy bank to rebuild China, and many other countries are doing the same thing.

So we're losing our good jobs, so many of them. When you look at what's happening in Mexico, a friend of mine who builds plants said it's the eighth wonder of the world. They're building some of the biggest plants anywhere in the world, some of the most sophisticated, some of the best plants. With the United States, as he said, not so much.

On NAFTA and "Hillary's responsibility&quot ?):

Well, he <President Bill Clinton> approved NAFTA. He approved NAFTA, which is the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.

Now, can we liberal progressives really argue against this "populist" sentiment?

Ezra Klein says, "Hell, yeah! Facts matter!":

To Trump, NAFTA is some kind of original economic sin — a core cause of our current economic troubles. So let’s talk about NAFTA.

Economists disagree as to the exact effects of the treaty, but virtually every paper published on the subject finds the effect on the American economy was small. A review of 11 econometric studies of NAFTA finds effects ranging from a modest reduction in wage growth for blue-collar workers to a 0.17 percent increase in overall American wages.

<Much more on NAFTA at OP link>

On Trump's assertion jobs are "fleeing the country":

It’s a simple fact that none of this is true. Jobs aren’t fleeing the United States. August marked the 78th straight month in which the US economy added jobs — we’re in the single longest streak of private sector job growth in American history. China isn’t devaluing its currency — in fact, it’s propping it up to stop investors from fleeing the country. The biggest plant in the world is being built by Tesla in Fremont, California, and the existing biggest plant in the world is a Boeing factory in Washington state.

And how did the press and M$M analyze all this as a winning argument for Trump?

And so we attempt, peculiarly, to recast ourselves as observers of voter reactions we can’t observe. We judge the debate based not on what we think to be true about it but on what we think the public will think to be true about it. And so we end up asking not whether the candidates made good arguments given what we know to be true but whether they made good arguments given what we imagine voters know to be true. And once you’re in that mindset, a section where Trump sounded good can be a win even if nothing he said made sense — after all, fairly few voters are trade policy or labor market experts.

"A Well-Informed Electorate Is a Prerequisite for Democracy"

Read it all at: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/9/27/13076848/trump-trade-debate