NAFTA what has it done for you?

Most of you weren't alive when Bill sold us this bill of goods, but it was with the promise if it didn't work it could be rescinded.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/03/business/fi-nafta3

But how many of you ask today's candidates where they stand on NAFTA or the SPP?

 

Oh, the idiocy, the agreement was made between Mulroney and Reagan.

And it's made my life a bit easier with the higher dollar thank you very much.

 

NAFTA has been a disaster.Free trade,yeah right.Its just another way for very wealthy companies to earn greater profits while jobs are lost etc. etc. etc.They should put an end to NAFTA.

 

It gave me shittier highways and increased fuel emissions.

 

NAFTA works for Canadians and Mexico. Majority rule. 66% aren't squawking like 33% are.

It would work even better if the U.S. stopped trying to cheat the system.


Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Canada and Mexico are escalating their allegations that the U.S. is flouting the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement in order to protect domestic producers.

Canadians are dropping what Prime Minister Paul Martin called ``the safe language of diplomacy'' and spurning new negotiations on a dispute involving U.S. export limits on Canadian softwood lumber. Mexico is publicly supporting the Canadians in the lumber case as it pursues its own grievance over a long-running sugar trade dispute.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000086&sid=a91wyelXZe9s&refer=latin_america

 

Um, bloomberg is a US-led Wall Street company. It's a little biased when it comes to free trade.

And not to mention that article seems to have been written 3 years ago in October when Paul Martin was PM of Canada, and during the time of the Softwood Lumber dispute before the election in December in Canada, when it was a huge issue with NAFTA and loggers in Canada. So yeah, we were making a huge stink of it up here and for good reason.

It's not the full story, Alfi.

 

Not quite accurate.

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp173

 

NAFTA was followed by one of the longest economic expansions in post war history. Unemployment hit 30 year lows.

Saying that NAFTA resulted is job losses is basically a lie. I know what you will do - claim that everybody just had bad jobs, but you won't back that up with actual data. So don't bother.

 

NAFTA has moved a couple of jobs I've had down to Mexico, without me of course.

 

NAFTA didn't cause the economic boom folks the tech bubble did. Wise up.

You have to look deeper than just what happened when.

 

Saying that NAFTA has lead to job increases for any of the three countries or economic booms is just a lie. I think I've provided verifiable sources to back up my statements.

One has to wonder why Hillary was agreeable to rescinding it during her campaign if it's such a boon to our economy?

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/clinton-says-she-raised-yellow-caution-flag-on-nafta/

 

Where did you prove it? You think that linking to an anti-NAFTA editorial proves NAFTA must be bad? Come on. You articles hardly even quoted any numbers or provided sources, they just moaned about NAFTA. Statements like "over a million jobs that would otherwise have been created were lost" are especially lame - since they can't find actual job losses they refer to hypothetical jobs which were hypothetically lost?

You are also contradicting yourself as usual. You claim NAFTA cost jobs but when I point out unemployment hit record lows, you say it was just a tech bubble. Well, which is it, did unemployment go up or down after NAFTA? You know it went down. And is that because the tech bubble resulted in the whole country moving to silicon valley and taking up coding? No. You seem to believe that the tech bubble erased the entire decades worth of growth and falling unemployment, which is completely ridiculous.

 

Wait. Soon you will get the North American Union of Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. Three governments ought to be three times as bad. And the practical people call anarchists, utopians!!!!!

 

There is no NAU. Its just fearmongering for the gullible.

 

But there is a SPP.

 

Perhaps you could outline exactly what the jobs created by NAFTA were, there should be ample data out there somewhere outlining exactly what these jobs were, and what their wage scales were. Perhaps, you could explain why it hasn't stemmed the flow of illegal aliens?

And yes unemployment went down for a number of reasons, 1. Reporting criteria was revised so that many were no longer counted. 2. The tech bubble did actually create a hell of a lot of jobs and wealth during that period, I'd like you to prove that it wasn't the largest factor in economic growth during that period. The tech bubble didn't erase anything, it created it.

 

Some of the effects on the US's trading partners:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JZS/is_21_23/ai_n25013810

 

Yes but you keep implying that the tech bubble burst and a whole decades growth disappeared with it. This is complete crap, the tech bubble burst was followed by one of the mildest recessions in history.

As for you data requests, no thanks. You have shown time again that when you get data you don't like, you ask for more data, and when you don't like it, you ask for still more data. And if that still doesn't give you what you want, then you just conclude someone must be distorting the data. Its a waste of time.

NAFTA is a bogeyman. It isn't all that important, GATT and WTO agreements are far more influential, they are just a little too complicated to make a good bogeyman.

NAFTA MYTHS

NAFTA has transformed the U.S. economy.
Hardly. Critics rightly point out that NAFTA's economic benefits were oversold, but they're wrong to heap the blame for all America's woes on it. NAFTA, which expanded the existing Canadian-U.S. free-trade area to Mexico, has had only a marginal effect on the U.S. economy. Yes, exports to Mexico have more than tripled since 1993 -- but at $161 billion last year, they still account for only 1.1 percent of the economy. Considering that total U.S. exports have more than doubled over the same period, to more than $1.6 trillion a year, the boost from NAFTA is just a trifle.
Though imports from Mexico have risen nearly five-fold since 1993 -- potentially threatening some U.S. businesses -- they only amounted to $230 billion in 2007, or less than 1.7 percent of the $14 trillion U.S. economy. That's peanuts. And for all the fears of factories being shipped south on the back of an 18-wheeler, the total U.S. investment in Mexican factories and offices adds up to a mere $75 billion. Mexico received just $19 billion in foreign direct investment in 2006, while the United States attracted $175 billion. Thus, the "giant sucking sound" that Texas businessman and independent presidential candidate H. Ross Perot heard back in the 1990s doesn't sound so giant after all. But the benefits of NAFTA don't seem so remarkable, either



2 NAFTA has put countless Americans out of work.
Not really. Obama claims that NAFTA has destroyed a million American jobs. Suppose he's right. Total employment still rose by 27 million jobs between 1993 and 2007, to 137.6 million, and the unemployment rate has fallen. At worst, then, NAFTA has cost only a tiny minority of American workers their jobs. And even that is a one-sided view. As Mexico opened its economy to U.S. trade and investment, NAFTA created new American jobs, too.
NAFTA critics also decry the trade deficit with Mexico, but at $70 billion a year, it accounts for only 0.5 percent of the U.S. economy. These figures should quiet NAFTA foes, who point to lost jobs and stagnant manufacturing wages, as well as boosters, who trumpet claims of rising output and record-high exports. The fact is, NAFTA has had only a fractional impact on these trends.

Why? You post articles that cite random statistics on random countries for random time periods and make no attempt to prove that any of the trends are directly the result of NAFTA. Yet that's good enough for you - its only when data doesn't support you that suddenly you reach for your reading glasses and you start pretending to care. Its fake, nobody falls for it.

 

I never mentioned anything about what happened when the tech bubble burst. I just pointed out that Clinton and NAFTA can't claim responsibility for the economic boom of that period.

The statistics I have posted are not random figures if you read the articles in the links they are clearly delineated. And as to random countries, it was my understanding that it was the US, Canada and Mexico that are in involved in this trade agreement so referring to the effects on any of the three should be relevant.

Your link cites no data sources. But they do say this: Though imports from Mexico have risen nearly five-fold since 1993 -- potentially threatening some U.S. businesses -- they only amounted to $230 billion in 2007, or less than 1.7 percent of the 14 trillion U.S. economy. That's peanuts.....But the benefits of NAFTA don't seem so remarkable, either. Then why defend it so ferociously? And I think to the US businesses that were threatened or pushed out of business it is important.

If you want to talk about GATT or the WTO open a new thread. I have a reason for keeping the discussion about NAFTA going. If it's not important why do we need the SPP in order to expand it's scope?

 

High dollar? Have you check the rate of exchange lately?