Republicans defend NAFTA

Ripon Advance News Service - U.S. Sens. Deb Fischer (R-NE) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) led a letter on Monday that highlighted the positive impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the potential consequences of abandoning the trade deal.

The letter to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer was signed by 18 senators, including U.S. Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Jerry Moran (R-KS), John Thune (R-SD), Mike Rounds (R-SD) and Pat Roberts (R-KS).

“Given that the agreement is more than two decades old, there are areas in which NAFTA will benefit from strengthening and modernization,” the letter states. “On the other hand, efforts to abandon the agreement or impose unnecessary restrictions on trade with our North American partners will have devastating economic consequences.”

The senators noted that NAFTA has led to “tremendous growth” in U.S. trade with Mexico and Canada, and that it has “integrated cross-border supply chains that benefit U.S. employers, and more than tripled U.S. exports of goods, including agricultural and manufactured goods, and services.”
U.S. trade policy has been a prominent issue in recent months, the letter acknowledges, and taking a fresh look at NAFTA will be an immediate priority.

President Donald Trump had discussed terminating NAFTA as recently as last month, but had said he would delay such a move after the president of Mexico and the prime minister of Canada urged the United States to renegotiate rather than scrap the deal.

“If I’m unable to make a fair deal, if I’m unable to make a fair deal for the United States, meaning a fair deal for our workers and our companies, I will terminate NAFTA,” Trump said on April 27 in remarks during a meeting with the president of Argentina. “But we’re going to give renegotiation a good, strong shot,” he added.

The group of senators who signed the letter and who represent states that see a significant economic impact from trade said they will maintain a keen interest in the on-going process surrounding NAFTA.

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Donald Trump can't get the facts right about NAFA. It was not "Clinton's NAFTA," and it was not a "bad deal."

Time and time again, Donald Trump has called NAFTA, "Clinton's NAFTA" and has emphasized that it was bill Clinton who signed NAFTA. It is incorrect to call it "Clinton's NAFTA" and only partly correct to say it was signed by Bill Clinton. The NAFTA agreement was signed by George H. W. Bush. The bill that ratified it was signed by Bill Clinton. Below is the Wikipedia explanation of NAFTA: 

Following diplomatic negotiations dating back to 1990 among the three nations, U.S. President George H. W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas, each responsible for spearheading and promoting the agreement, ceremonially signed the agreement in their respective capitals on December 17, 1992. The signed agreement then needed to be ratified by each nation's legislative or parliamentary branch.

After much consideration and emotional discussion, the House of Representatives passed the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act on November 17, 1993, 234-200. The agreement's supporters included 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats. The bill passed the Senate on November 20, 1993, 61-38. Senate supporters were 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats. Clinton signed it into law on December 8, 1993; the agreement went into effect on January 1, 1994.  

Back row, left to right: Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, U.S. President George H. W. Bush, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, at the initialing of the draft North American Free Trade Agreement in October 1992. In front are Mexican Secretary of Commerce and Industrial Development Jaime Serra Puche, United States Trade Representative Carla Hills, and Canadian Minister of International Trade Michael Wilson

President Bill Clinton signed the bill that implemented NAFTA but NAFTA was negotiated under George H. W. Bush, pushed by Bush, ceremonially signed by George H. W. Bush and passed with majority Republican support in the House of Representatives and the Senate.  To his credit Clinton signed it into law, against the wishes of his party saying, "NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement."

To call NAFTA, "Clinton's NAFTA" distorts the facts. 

NAFTA has been good for America.http://www.cato.org/…/after-10-years-nafta-continues-pay-di…

NAFTA was the right thing to do then and is still good for America. Here is an analysis from the Council on Foreign Relations:

In the years since NAFTA, U.S. trade with its North American neighbors has more than tripled, growing more rapidly than U.S. trade with the rest of the world. Canada and Mexico are the two largest destinations for U.S. exports, accounting for more than a third of the total. Most estimates conclude that the deal had a modest but positive impact on U.S. GDP of less than 0.5 percent, or a total addition of up to $80 billion dollars to the U.S. economy upon full implementation, or several billion dollars of added growth per year.

Such upsides of trade often escape notice, because while the costs are highly concentrated in specific industries like auto manufacturing, the benefits of a deal like NAFTA are distributed widely across society. Supporters of NAFTA estimate that some fourteen million jobs rely on trade with Canada and Mexico, while the nearly two hundred thousand export-related jobs created annually by the pact pay 15 to 20 percent more on average than the jobs that were lost

I know some conservatives view the CFR with suspicion. Here is what CATO has said about NAFTA:

... the North American Free Trade Agreement has been a success by any measure. Trade among the United States, Canada, and Mexico has flourished since the passage of NAFTA, benefiting American consumers and exporters. Since 1993, two-way trade with our NAFTA partners has increased by 44 percent, to $421 billion in 1996. That compares with a 33 percent increase in American trade with all other countries.² Mexico has now become America’s second largest market for exports, just ahead of Japan and behind only Canada.
NAFTA has been modestly beneficial for the U.S. economy, even though Mexico’s economy is relatively small compared to the American economy. It is obvious today that the “giant sucking sound” predicted by Ross Perot has not been heard. Since the passage of NAFTA in 1993, the real gross domestic product of the United States has expanded by 12 percent and civilian employment has grown by more than 8 million, including a net increase of half a million jobs in manufacturing.³ Inflation has remained subdued at 2 to 3 percent, thanks partly to the price competition of imports.

The job “losses” that critics of free trade blame on NAFTA are mostly fictitious, based on the misuse of trade deficit numbers. About 150,000 Americans have filed for benefits under a program for workers allegedly displaced by increased imports from Mexico and Canada. As painful as the displacement may be for those workers, the U.S. economy during the last four years has created that many net new jobs approximately every three weeks.

National Review says, No, Mr. Trump, NAFTA Was Not a ‘Bad Deal.’

What gets totally lost in the populist focus on anecdotes such as the Carrier story are three much larger trends. First, the U.S. has added 31 million payroll jobs since 1994, or 29 million workers (depending on which methodology one uses). Second, average hourly earnings, adjusting for inflation, are 43 percent higher than in 1994. Third, U.S. manufacturing output has reached record highs, and part of the reason is that so much global trade consists of intermediate goods in fantastically efficient supply chains.

The Wall Street Journal writes: Memo to Trump: Nafta Helps Americans.

Without the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta), manufacturing would be in even worse shape. .... Mexico is not about to voluntarily foot the bill for any such wall. But Mr. Trump says that he can make our neighbor pay by imposing new tariffs on its exports to the U.S. In other words, Mr. Trump plans to launch a trade war with Mexico. ...preposterous an idea as it is dangerous. ... According to “NAFTA Triumphant,” a report last month by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, annual U.S. trade with Canada and Mexico is now $1.3 trillion, nearly four times greater than before the agreement. Agricultural exports to Canada and Mexico have gone up by 350%, and U.S. service exports have tripled. More than a third of U.S. merchandise exports are now bought by Nafta partners.

Mr. Trump’s trade agenda is absurd and would invite a depression. He’s either too uneducated in economics to know that or too cynical to care.

I am firmly convinced that Donald Trump is a dangerous man. The last sentence above in the WSJ article sums up my view of Donald Trump. 

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That NAFTA Superhighway

If you get any of your news from any source other than the mainstream press you have probably heard about the NAFTA super highway. For the last couple years bloggers have been blogging about it and almost any political chat group has been chatting about it. I never took it seriously and dismissed it as mere fantasy from the tinfoil hat crowd. I reasoned that if a new roadway connecting Mexico, the US and Canada was being build to facilitate increased trade between our nations, that that would probably be a good thing and was nothing to get upset about.

It seemed that the same people who were alarmed about the NAFTA super highway were the same ones who want us to return to the gold standard, abolish the Federal Reserve and are always worry about the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderbergs, and the Illuminati. I was not alarmed. The John Birch Society folks and the other paranoid super patriots are generally harmless, good intentioned, conservative folks who just kind of went off the deep end on certain issues. I don’t get too worked up about them. Then I noticed that the kooky left, the folks who believe 911 was an inside job, started talking about the NAFTA highway also. It is amazing how often the kooky right and the kooky left share a lot of the same concerns.

With the advent of the Ron Paul campaign, the NAFT Superhighway began getting more and more publicity. Ron Paul’s opposition to it became a major part of his campaign. Next thing you know other conservatives, including Duncan Hunter, and Tom Tancredo, were taking positions pledging to stop it. Then the established responsible conservative publication Human Events started reporting on it. Then, CNN’s Lou Dobbs started reporting on it.

According to opponents of this NAFTA Superhighway, a secret organization run by shadowy government figures is in cahoots with foreign corporations who are determined to undermine American sovereignty. This group is supposedly building a ten-lane highway the width of several football fields, with freight and rail lines and oil and natural gas pipelines and electric power lines running alongside the roadway. It will run from deep in Mexico all the way into Canada with feeder roads connected to it throughout. That is not the extent of what they have planned however. This superhighway is just part of a bigger plot to form a North American Union with a single currency and open borders. The North American Union would be similar to the European Union. The organization that it putting this all together is something called the “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,” or the SPP.
The SPP does exist but it looks like just another little agency with a small bureaucracy. The purpose of the SPP is to facilitate increased security and prosperity among the US, Canada and Mexico. Other than maybe wasting a little money it appears nothing to be too concerned about.

Another entity that is part of this plot to build this roadway and take away our sovereignty is the America's SuperCorridor Organization (NASCO), which is a partnership of public and private entities. The map you see is their map but it is not showing a new highway at all, but shows the location of existing interstates. NASCO had been referring to these existing highways for years as the "NAFTA Superhighway,” They advocate improvements and promotion of this corridor. You can think of NASCO as a kind of regional Chamber of Commerce.

The Texas legislature has approved the development of a big ten-lane limited access toll road called will Trans Texas Corridor, which would parallel I-35 and stretch from the Mexican border to Oklahoma. I am not so sure what is so sinister about that. It may be a bad idea, but the elected representatives of the people of Texas think it is good idea, so who am I to say they are wrong. Quite frankly, I like the concept of funding new roadways by toll revenue.

I am not going to provide links to document this, if you are interested, just Google the terms, “NAFTA Superhighway”, “SPP”, “North American Union”, “NASCO” and “Trans Texas Corridor” and you will get about a half million hits. Read them. I see no evidence that there is anything to be concerned about. There is not a NAFTA Superhighway. There is nothing to be alarmed about. There is no grand plan to divide America by a roadway that is under the authority of a non-American entity. I do not see a threat to American sovereignty.

With a war in Iraq and the accompanying concern about mid-East stability, with a faltering economy, concern about global warming and energy security, and a housing crisis, I have more important things to worry about other than a fantasy highway.

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