Posted on 05/05/2016 9:30:43 AM PDT by reaganaut1
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Trump promises a return to tariffs. He also promises a wall with Mexico, penalties against profitable American companies, skimming foreign remittances, and more. Trump does not mince words, and you have to respect his forthrightness. What each of these solutions has in common is a heavy-handed government that imposes its will at the price of consumer freedom.
What right does a White House staffer have to tell you what you can buy and the extra price you have to pay if you choose the wrong product? Your freedom to trade — to buy what you want — is what’s at stake when anti-traders get rolling. They say it’s about protecting producers, but that is not how trade barriers work. Hugo Chavez and Joseph Stalin put up huge trade barriers and guess how many jobs that helped Venezuela and the Soviets create? Ni odnogo, as they say in Russian. Not a single one.
Yesterday, I asked Michael Boskin, former chief economist under President Bush in the early 1990s and the godfather of lowered trade barriers in North America, how he feels when NAFTA is used by politicians as the scapegoat for economic anxiety. He reminded me that faith in free trade waxes and wanes. The failure of tariffs is a constant in history, one that each generation demands to relearn. He asked: Remember the Corn Laws in 19th-century Britain? Remember the trade barriers among the states after the 1776 revolution that inspired our free-trade Constitution in 1789? The American Revolution in 1776 was inspired by the British Tea Act of 1773. It was the ultimate trade war: for freedom and against tariffs. How many young Sanders or Trump voters realize that?
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
The problems at Carrier are cumulative, not just a single one, starting with the new EPA edicts on cooling gasses, to taxes/Obamacare, to energy costs tripling in the last few years due to EPA coal regs, to the long Union strike a couple of years ago.
Most of it has been GOVERNMENT IMPOSED, by edict, and can be easily reversed.
I can still hear that giant sucking sound.
It was another straight-talking billionaire businessman who warned us about NAFTA. Why is it that these great businessmen can see things that these academic and think-tank wonks, who only produce words, cannot? That’s right, these business titans need to deal with the real world, where there are serious financial consequences for being wrong.
He told people in Indiana that he was going to penalize companies who moved to Mexico and expected to ship their goods back to America with no penalties. Leaving America and dumping 1400 Americans in order to produce in Mexico with Mexican labor was their choice. Trump used Ford and Carrier as examples of WHAT IS GoiNG ON NOW under so-called Free Trade. Go back and READ what he said. Evidently you didn’t understand his point.
Not that NAFTA is free trade to begin with
******
Clinton signed the Bush backed NAFTA agreement on 12/8/93. On December 20, 1994, Mexico devalued it’s Peso making US exports more expensive and Mexican imports cheaper.
It’s all about money manipulation.
Well done Bush/Clinton!
NR is just one big mess. They don’t know what they are, or who they are.
Here’s the quote when Buckley’s kid left the mag a few years ago:
“Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case. So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.”
Hmm. OK, ao what did he then do? He endorsed and voted for Obama!
The remaining crew is now set to endorse, either overtly or tacitly,
Hillary, the nation-destroyer. A more screwed-up group of navel gazers one cannot find (unless you count “RedState”).
and didn’t we end up having to bail out their government to the tune of $50 billion not long after that?
"In December 1994, as Mexicans watched their currency's buying power plummet 40 percent, President Ernesto Zedillo stunned world-wide financial markets by devaluing the peso. Zedillo blamed the crisis on his predecessor, Carlos Salinas, who had attempted to get Mexico out from under mounting foreign debt and national poverty by launching reforms that slashed triple-digit inflation, dismantled trade barriers, and opened the Mexican economy to foreign investment.
"Part of Salinas' anti-inflation strategy was to tie the value of the Mexican peso to the U.S. dollar so that the value of the peso would not fall, and investments in Mexico would be safe. Since the beginning of this policy in 1988, investors in the United States and other countries poured $50 billion into Mexico. But with the passing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, rising U.S. interest rates lured foreign investors to favor the dollar over the peso. To keep the peso's value on par the Mexican government was forced to use its foreign currency reserves to purchase pesos. Mexico's $30 billion foreign exchange reserves plummeted while the government spent as much as $1 billion a day. By December 19, reserves had dropped below $10 billion, with no end in sight."
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406400572.html
“It’s not really a poop sandwich!” exclaims the guy handing you a poop sandwich.
Americans are not stupid, just intellectually lazy.
Looks like they are waking up a little.
LOL! Not a bad deal? It was & is horrendous!
Yes, in ‘95 Clinton asked congress for a $50 Billion dollar bailout of Mexico. Congress refused but Clinton sidestepped them and raided the Exchange Stabilization Fund for $25 Billion.
One reason I can’t relate to anyone claiming to be a Republican. None of them really are.
I guess you missed the NR article that said such places were full of people who were nothing but trash and the towns deserved to die, huh ?
Good post.
Eisenhower, BTW, considered himself a Main Street, small business Republican, as opposed to one wedded to Wall Street. He was suspicious of the influence wielded by large corporations, as reflected in his warning about a military-industrial complex.
Yes it was a bad deal. It doesn’t matter if the super rich got richer by exchanging middle class US manufacturing workers for cheap Chinese and third world labor. We see all around us the results of “free trade” in factories shut down and jobs replaced with service industry jobs. While I totally disagree with the idea of $15 an hour minimum wage the reason we are even having this discussion is because of the results of NAFTA. Free trade has basically sold out the western world and propped the communist Chinese and made them a world power that they would’ve never been on their own.
Yes poor and working class america gets cheap trinkets , a cell phone, and cable tv but what they have lost is dignity and now instead of one parent being able to bring home the bacon it requires two plus a day care provider and then a lawyer to handle the divorce and the neglected increasingly juvenile delinquent children. Then for retirement the parents both working often end up having their grown ass “adult” children move back in or at least drop off their grand babies spawned via multiple baby mommas/daddies.
The elite live in a world apart so it isn’t surprising they think things are just fine with Nafta and their solution “Just take out an expensive loan and go to college”. They kill coal mines and then behave as if its the coal miners problem and are surprised when candidates like Trump rise in popularity as if the working class should just be happy to go on welfare and work at McDonalds or send their kids to be indoctrinated in globalism, deviance, and antiAmericanism on their dime at Universities.
I think they began sowing the seeds of their destruction decades ago. By the 90s they had alienated the Buchanan guys by purging him from the party.
The magazine led the charge. Now, the working class, anti-illegal immigration, America-first foreign policy folks have crashed the party again, and this time chose its leader. They hate it.
I saw the headline and thought “what?” Then I saw where it was from, NR, and thought “no wonder, these people have turned communist on us. Only good for toilet paper.
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