NAFTA: The end is nigh:
…the issue of Canada and Mexico making trade agreements with other nations (especially China), while brokering their NAFTA position with the U.S. as a strategic part of those agreements, is a serious issue that cannot adequately be resolved while the U.S. remains connected to NAFTA.
So you see, if you just look at the pure economics of the options, and you remember that President Trump is constitutionally antithetical to anyone having influence over U.S. interests other than the American people inside the United States, you can clearly see there is only one-way this entire process ends.
President Trump will end NAFTA.
What I hear Trump saying is this,
“hey Canada, if you want to turn all your manufacturing over to counties like China knock yourself out, but here in America we want to maintain our ability to manufacture some things because not everybody can work at google”
^This and it is a national Security issue (along the lines of the Berry Amendment). In addition, I want to live in a diversified economy. BTW, none other than Hillary Clinton made a similar case a decade or so ago.
I don’t think you can have a first world economy without manufacturing. I guess the Workers and Main Street are just not down with their children being leveled to third world subsistence agricultural workers. Think where we all would be if our betters had their way on Energy Independence; the Middle would be on its knees. The Dems offer the cargo cult solution: handouts, subsidies, fake make work jobs that do not grow the pie. If we give you the accoutrements of the Middle class, you will be the Middle Class. Sheesh….GOPe Republicans imagine everyone in the middle will become entrepreneurs, cattle trading speculators in the future’s market, join the military or ricochet between amazing dead end temporary service jobs.
The Davos caste and K Street are mostly about gaming the system, not growing the economic pie with real wealth. It is rigged so that they get most of the gain, meanwhile they offload the pain, by shifting the cost of their failures and misadventures onto the public. Privatizing gain and socializing pain is key to their power.
“He promised jobs and has, for the most part, delivered. ”
No he hasn’t. The economy was already on the upswing before Trump showed up.
Anyone who thinks that smuggling Chinese steel into America is somehow ‘bad’ for America is an idiot. Canada and Mexico are doing America a huge favor by neutering their self-inflicted damage. Cheap feedstock = more manufacturing
And no, there still isn’t such thing as a ‘trade deficit’. It’s an accounting fiction because balances of account always balance.
“I don’t think you can have a first world economy without manufacturing.”
Why not? Manufacturing is accounting for less and less of our economy, much like farming. There’s nothing wrong with this in the slightest.
“the Dems offer the cargo cult solution: handouts, subsidies, fake make work jobs that do not grow the pie.”
Bad but still better than protectionism.
I have to reiterate: no one has the right to stop me from trading with whomever as long as it isn’t North Korea or something. YOU DO NOT HAVE A RIGHT TO A JOB.
What’s all the more hilarious is that those jobs are never coming back and automation ensure the end of many of the rest.
John:
The link you provided on steel is to US figure from International Trade Admin. I linked to this source in the thread on Trump Steel Duties. In a dozen news stories I sourced, all used these same figures, remarkably the figures agreed in every story. Not surprisingly US and Can are each other’s top customer as trade goes, with US enjoying a slight trade advantage.
Can’s exports to US are 4.3 m m tonnes. But Can’s imports from China are only .7m m tonnes. So if 100% of Chinese imports were simply, redirected to US, (unlikely), that still is a fraction of total exports (4.3 m m tonnes). If Can was dumping Chinese steel into US I would expect that import figure to be much larger.
The case that China is a problem to US steel imports and that Can is complicit in that, is not supported by these figures.
OK perhaps Trump is using other figures, but these come from official US government sources. I can’t see that he has a case for raising duties on Can steel.
Why are you still talking?
Poor-grade steel from China isn’t good for anyone. Why would Canada produce its own steel and then export it? Canada has this uncanny habit of either not producing goods or refining them elsewhere at great cost.
Yes, there are trade deficits. Look for further than your favourite country, China.
Martin, please see this:
“Canada needs a steel strategy” – Financial Post – November 5, 2013
” “the Dems offer the cargo cult solution: handouts, subsidies, fake make work jobs that do not grow the pie.”
Bad but still better than protectionism.”
Pretty dystopian but probably a dream come true for all the trash out there.
The techie vision of the future is one in which the middle class all but disappears, with those not sufficiently merged with machine intelligence relegated to rent-paying serfs living on “income maintenance.” Theirs is a world in where long-standing local affinities are supplanted by Facebook’s concept of digitally-created “meaningful communities.” Joel Kotkin
“I have to reiterate: no one has the right to stop me from trading with whomever as long as it isn’t North Korea or something.”
I don’t think anyone is planning to step between you girls and your cheap Chinese tchotchkes.