The House and Senate are debating and will vote on three free trade agreements today. The three agreements probably should not be treated the same. It might make sense to pass the South Korea agreement. The United Auto Workers, and all of the Big 3 Detroit automakers support the deal. The AFL-CIO does not. The Panama agreement probably doesn’t make much difference either way. Their economy is too small to have much influence on ours. But they have worked hard to clean up their status as a tax cheat haven. They have made concessions on environmental and labor laws. I don’t see a reason to oppose the agreement. The Colombia agreement is different. I would oppose it because of how Colombia treats its own labor movement.
If I had to guess, I’d say that these trade agreements will boost U.S, exports, leading to more jobs, some of which will be created in other countries. I don’t foresee a bunch of American factories moving to Korea or Panama, but some car parts business might move from Michigan to China. On balance, we’ll probably come out ahead, but could come out slightly behind.
There’s a reason that these bills are passing with little opposition or much public debate. They just aren’t that big of a deal. There are important issues involved, and individual industries and businesses will be impacted, but none of them will be as important or damaging as NAFTA.
If I had to vote on these bills, I’d do more research and listen to the people whose businesses will be impacted positively or negatively. Right now, based on what I know, I’d sign off on South Korea and Panama, but not Colombia.
However, I respect the view of those who think we should oppose the entire way we think about trade, and that these bills should be killed on principle.
What do you think?
Here’s the Congressional Research Service report (pdf) on the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
Yeah, what the Hell, export the last jobs we have.
The Senate can’t vote for unemployment benefits, but they can always vote to rape the American worker.
I don’t understand that reaction. The only one of the three that’s consequential at all is the one with Korea, and the auto workers think it will help them make and sell more cars. Could they be wrong? Sure.
As for the one with Panama, we’re not even going to notice that it happened.
And Colombia? Who knows? Maybe we’ll make even fewer clothes in this country. They don’t exactly have the biggest economy in the world (assuming you’re not counting narcotics).
But even if these agreements do cost us a net loss in jobs, it will be less than the jobs we typically create in this lousy economy in a single month. Even NAFTA, as bad as it was, cost an estimated 600,000 jobs over almost two decades. By contrast, we lost more than that for several straight months in 2008-2009.
Just as these three bills won’t create a bunch of jobs, they won’t cost them either. My guess is that we’ll actually come out a little ahead, but I predict it will be basically a wash.
Panama, the 1% wants the agreement so they can hide their money closer to home.
Korea, I heard this took a long time to complete because the koreans did not want our big gas guzzlers in their country.
Columbia, as the price of oil goes up, shipping stuff from China will become too expensive. Thus, the second step in outsourcing closer to home. The first was NAFTA.
From August 16th:
You can be skeptical. I am. But it’s worth noting.
That’s so Detroit can get more sub-assemblies cheap from Korea. No one with half a brain thinks Koreans are going to buy American cars. Korea is export oriented just like Japan and China.
I don’t know about the bills either. What I do know is that the scumbags who have cheered on the Reagan era’s destruction of the middle class LOVE these bills.
I also know that if the Democrats actually stood up and fought these bills it would reasonate with a lot of independents.
I like free trade. I dislike free trade agreements. I don’t think they kill that many jobs — the hyperbole about them is rather annoying. But they’re not free trade; they gouge out special interests.
Isn’t that kind of unavoidable when the subject matter of the negotiations is protective tariffs?
Perhaps. I didn’t follow the discussion regarding these agreements, so I don’t know the specifics really. But all free trade agreements are the same in that regard, so in general it’s a safe bet to have that knee-jerk reaction.
Plus, as I said, free trade agreements are not “job killers,” especially when other countries own more share of the wealth on Earth in a globalized economy that would be globalized with or without these agreements. Thus I really don’t care to learn much about them because in 10-20 years from now we’ll find them to be a wash: kill some jobs in some area of the country, and bring jobs to some other part in a sector that requires less manual labor than the jobs lost.
Whatever the cause of our economic woes, it’s not because of NAFTA or other free trade agreements.
Also, I get that the president needs to play up the government capable of passing shit, but his overselling their effectiveness is equally annoying.
Also, I think in this case it’d be a good idea to just ask Krugman what he thinks. Trade is his specialty, after all. I suspect he probably supports them to some degree, but doesn’t think they’ll do jack shit about our unemployment situation.
I’m confused again.
I keep hearing about this “do nothing” congress, right? I hear about all the trumpeted (trumped up?) faiures, then I see things like this quietly squeak by on a bipartisan basis. If Republicans didn’t want these bills passed, we’d there would be more noise. And nothing good has ever happened on quiet Republican desires.
This congress has gotten a lot done, it’s just nothing that the people really want or understand because it’s all so deliberately arcane and sneaky. The term “free trade” has been demonized to death, a la “liberal.”
This has me more than suspicious.