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Bashing free trade won't fix economic woes
By MARY SANCHEZThe Kansas City Star
Many Americans — those in the middle and on the lower end of the economic spectrum — are feeling vulnerable right now. And so candidates — at least, Democratic ones — seem to be banking on denunciations of NAFTA as a way to win voters, especially in the Rust Belt.
As it happens, however, there isn’t much of a national consensus on the benefits of free trade. True, machinists and textile workers dislike it, while farmers love it (at least for now). But most Americans don’t know what to make of it.
They realize that technology is changing the world at a tremendous rate. They understand that, yes, a lot of jobs have shifted overseas — but they come back again in many instances.
Yet to listen to the comments of some Democrats lately, one would think that nothing good came out of NAFTA, and that trade accords are never avenues to increase exports to foreign markets and to promote good will that just might aid us later in ways unseen.
A cursory look at recent history doesn’t bear out this view. Remember the “giant sucking sound” presidential candidate Ross Perot prophesied about in 1992? Well, the suction turned out to have come from China and India, not from Mexico, as he warned. In fact, Mexico has lost manufacturing jobs to foreign competition since NAFTA was passed in 1994. Meanwhile, the United States has added 26 million new jobs.
Agriculture offers a largely positive picture of free trade. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, from 1992 to 2007 the value of U.S. agriculture exports in the world rose by 65 percent. During the same time period, farm and food exports to Canada and Mexico grew by 156 percent.
That’s great if you are a farmer, connected to the cattle or poultry industries, which also boomed, or in some related business. It’s not so great if you get affected by the out-of-work Mexican farmer who comes to the United States searching for work after being displaced by all the corn the United States now sends south of the border.
And that’s part of the rub. Free trade is attempting to open up markets between developed and developing countries. And globalization — which is really just the phenomenon of “emerging” nations developing their commercial capacities for a world market — is bound to occur with or without our trade pacts. Mexico did not do enough to retrain its agrarian populations and shift its economy. Neither did the United States, hence the problems with lost manufacturing jobs and people not ready to fill the better-paying new jobs that require different skills.
Rather than merely bashing NAFTA, we should learn from it. When it comes to trade, the truth is NAFTA is a mixed bag. It did not pump up our economy as much as people once claimed it would. And it did not hurt workers as much as the Democrats would have you believe.
Mistakes were made in negotiating the agreement, and more can be done to ensure that adding jobs to foreign markets doesn’t mean increasing labor rights violations.
Forcing Colombia to protect its union organizers and members from being killed would be a good start. And we should hold the nation to following through with those protections. President Bush is content that the murder rate has dropped. That’s a start, but the killings and kidnappings are still occurring.
But to tell people that they are hurting economically because of free trade is opportunistic and basically untrue. As if the subprime housing mess isn’t occurring. As if U.S.-based industry hasn’t massively increased its ability to produce more with fewer workers in recent years, which is generally a good thing. As if trade deals must be imploded before this country does a better job at retraining its workers for the types of jobs we need filled now — far less manufacturing and more technical and service industry.
Democrats, intent on gathering voters to their side, are crying wolf on free trade. There is no doubt that many Americans are dealing with very real economic insecurity. The world is changing, and the United States needs to take steps to keep up. That includes reforming health care, education and a host of other policy areas.
Bashing free trade, as easy as it is to do on the campaign stump, won’t solve anything.