LOL -like since the dawn of man. This is nothing new.

I can understand that you wouldn’t want to take the word of one person that 90 percent of economists view NAFTA favorably, but to say that it wouldn’t matter even if it were true makes you sound like a global warming denier who dismisses the overwhelming consensus of scientists on that issue. I mean, come on, it’s been awfully cold this winter and we all know that data can be manipulated to prove anything.

I’m sure if 90 percent of economists said NAFTA has had a detrimental effect, you’d readily cite that as evidence to support your position. It’s more difficult to accept something that contradicts what we are preconceived to believe.

And is Michael Kinsley a part of the Washington consensus?

Joe, Nancy,

I agree that what politicians say and what they deliver are two entirely different things. It’s been that way for a while. The problems is, even on issues that an elected official would truly like to make an impact on, they’re paralyzed to do anything because they’ll have to answer for it during the next election, either their own, or their party members. How many times have we heard that a tax increase, no matter how badly it is needed, won’t be brought up for a vote because it is an election year and no one can afford to support it?

MB,

I finally feel vindicated.

Thanks for commenting,
Dan

You are correct that this is bigger than NAFTA. NAFTA is often used as shorthand for a trade system that involves the WTO, GATT and the neoliberal economic philosophy generally. But there’s no doubt that the mass exportation of US manufacturing jobs rapidly increased after NAFTA. It did happen before but not nearly at the same rate.

Interesting that you would raise the immigration issue since that was one of the many problems NAFTA was supposed to solve. We were told NAFTA would slow immigration from Mexico because more decent paying jobs would be available there. Why has the immigration problem only gotten worse?

I think its a mistake to assume that this is all the result of natural market forces. Far from it. This is a global trade system specifically designed to benefit the multi-national corporations who largely wrote the agreements. A real free market would be preferable to the rigged system we have now.

And keep in mind that Adam Smith’s definition of a true global free market involves the free flow of capital AND labor. So why aren’t the champions of free trade arguing for open borders?
Obviously, that would defeat the purpose of being able to manufacture goods in the cheapest labor markets in the world and then selling those goods in the richest countries in the world.

You know the saying. There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Its easy for any economist to cite some very narrowly defined indicator to make things look better. Does it make sense to talk about wages of the average “blue collar” worker going up when we have millions fewer blue collar workers today than we did then? What is the author’s definition of a blue collar worker in this case? Just factory workers? What are the average wages of service workers and how many former blue collar factory workers are now working for lower wages in service industry jobs? Why doesn’t the article tell us those more pertinent details?
All the current news stories about the poor state of the economy make the article’s one isolated statistic about the unemployment rate very unconvincing.

Centralia and Galesburg are more than anecdotal because the same story is repeated over and over again. I’m not going to let the manipulation of statistics by someone in a think tank on the east coast make me deny the reality of what anyone can see by looking around. I keep hearing stories about these better jobs but I don’t see them in the real world. In fact those “better” high tech jobs, as I wrote before, are also being outsourced for lower wages to India.