Economists Toast 20 Years Of NAFTA; Critics Sit Out The Party

NPR ^ | 08 Dec 2013 | Marilyn Geewax

[driftdiver]

The jobs and production exodus started well before bam bam.

[JediJones]

You tell me, was our nation more successful prior to 1992, or less successful?

GDP per capita's been looking good since 1992, up until the Democrat housing recession. Are you seriously trying to make the mainstream media's case that there was a "Bush recession" prior to 2007? Our economy was doing great under most of Bush's terms.

[DoughtyOne]

Yes, you keyed in on exactly what I was thinking about. Some folks don’t see it that way, so I couch it a bit in the interest of comity. (Something I really shouldn’t do. I just don’t want to re-argue it over and over.)

It would make it easier for corporate entities to keep jobs stateside too. That’s the direction we need to be heading.

I might make a portion of the tax elimination contingent on bringing back jobs from overseas, but you’ve got exactly the right idea IMO.

This would probably cause a net increase in the tax base, because employees would be paying income tax. It’s a win/win IMO.

[DoughtyOne]

I’ll try to respond to your post later today.

When I do I’ll link you to some jobs numbers. Under Bush, the model for jobs growth over the prior 40 years, completely collapsed. During Bush’s first term, we actually lost jobs in the U. S. In his second term jobs figures improved slightly, but it was only fractional compared to tradition. Jobs were GONE!

As for this being the fault of Democrats, I’m sympathetic and would love to make that case. In part we can, because Frank and company did push through some terrible things.

The problem for us is that the Republicans had the majority in the House and Senate when Bush was President. This completely nullifies the case that it was all the Democrats. We had time to fix it if we really wanted to. We didn’t really want to.

As for real GDP, that’s nice and all, but when your nation is becoming a service economy and people are losing jobs and losing income if they can still hold a position, it’s simply not a productive situation. 25% of our workforce is out of work. A significant portion of that materialized under Bush. You didn’t see the massive disruption surface until 2009, but there was a lot of carnage going on under the surface.

I think there’s enough blame to go around concerning where we are right now. I don’t hold either side faultless.

[JediJones]

I’ve seen the “alternative” jobs chart of “real employment” that charts the way you describe, where things never recover to the level they were at right before the dot.com burst. I don’t know enough to say how much I trust that figure. I was wondering how it accounts for early retirees for instance.

Still, NAFTA was signed in 1993, so you would have to sell the idea that its negative effects on employment were delayed at least 5-8 years. And the fact that the economic downturn has been global would also seem to suggest it wasn’t a NAFTA/North American issue. In fact, Europe is basically doing worse than us.

Obviously Bush was not a real conservative reformer and was “compassionate,” so he kept the unemployment and welfare bennies expanding, which encourages people to stay unemployed.

I would suggest nothing hurts an economy more than an aging population. More of our wealth has to go to support non-working, non-productive retirees rather than be used for investment purposes. And that is a common problem between most of the western countries in the downturn.

There was a point in the 2000s when Bush and McCain and others wanted to reform Fannie and Freddie but they couldn’t get it past a Democrat filibuster. They never had the majority needed to break a filibuster. But of course they did not see the problem coming at the scale it did.

[Oatka]

If I want to buy a car, corn, or an orange from Mexico, no big-government statist has a constitutional right to order his troops to stand in my way. I’m a freedom-loving conservative, not a big-government statist out to regulate every little aspect of commerce someone chooses to engage in.

The consumer has every right to seek out the lowest price available for the goods they want to buy. The employee does not have the right to bar their employers from hiring someone who’s willing to do the same job for less money.

Typical Free Trade blather - until you show up for work and find the place of work gone overseas or told to train your replacement Rajeesh, who takes your position at half the wages.

[JediJones]

You could say the same thing about cutting government spending and laying off government employees. If we made it illegal for anyone to lose their job we’d still have a 19th century economy with no increased productivity or technology. To thrive, an economy needs to reallocate labor and resources freely to wherever efficiencies can be found. Institutions like unions who try to create protectionism around jobs so that no one can be fired hold our economy back, reduce our economic growth and our standard of living. No jobs other than a Supreme Court Justice are a lifetime appointment. And losing a job isn’t the end of someone’s life.