70,000 Alabama jobs said at risk if NAFTA talks crash

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3. American jobs massively increased after NAFTA but Gephardt had a reason to be angry about it

Gephardt exploded when he found out NAFTA failed to include this provision: that the Mexican minimum wage would rise in proportion to per capita gdp. Gephardt wisely knew that Mexico would pocket the profits without sharing with the workers, continuing a disadvantage for US workers. The treaty was good for us but it could have been much better. But our trade representative Mickey Kantor told Gephardt that he simply could not get Mexico to agree to that provision.

But people here or elsewhere yelled at me when I defended NAFTA. I bought it, read it, and it just lowered tariffs. Mostly the tariffs Mexico imposed on us. They had average tariffs on our stuff of 15% we had 5% on their stuff. Moving them toward zero helped level the playing field which was tilted against us.

Almost all economists, left right and center think free trade deals help our workers and our economy.

Would Brad De Long do us wrong? Would Paul Krugman? Hell no.

TPP would have been good for us (you may now attack me). The trade part was peanuts, trivial, rounding error. But it would bring southeast asian nations into our team politically. Now that we will not be part of it those nations will align with China instead.