Trans-Pacific Partnership to Boost US Exports and Increase Wages

[Potus]

The trade deal replaces 50,000 lower wage, lower skill manufacturing jobs with 50,000 higher wage, higher skill. Thus, the "wage growth" pointed to in the study is just an increase in the average.

This agreement breaks with the "rising tide" pattern of free trade agreements. After past expansions of trade, the deficit in skills between low and high skill was smaller. "Longterm unemployment and wage cuts" are exactly what folks wave away as the concerns of dumb rednecks and those uncivilized types.

Additionally, we have a pretty significant skills shortage in the economy. It's something like 5 million people. Compelling case against the trade agreement.

[Potus]

The trade deal replaces 50,000 lower wage, lower skill manufacturing jobs with 50,000 higher wage, higher skill. Thus, the "wage growth" pointed to in the study is just an increase in the average.

This agreement breaks with the "rising tide" pattern of free trade agreements. After past expansions of trade, the deficit in skills between low and high skill was smaller. "Longterm unemployment and wage cuts" are exactly what folks wave away as the concerns of dumb rednecks and those uncivilized types.

Additionally, we have a pretty significant skills shortage in the economy. It's something like 5 million people. Compelling case against the trade agreement.

If you are one of the workers being displacec as this article acknowledges in low skilled manufacturing and that new job isn't going to be going to you, then yea this is not just a bad idea. This is a financial apocalypse for those families.

Failure to understand, failure to do anything to alleviate it, in preference to just letting them eat cake is precisely why we have Trump and Sanders now, it is only going to get worse. If people could just for a minute, put theirselves in that person's shoes and understand what they are going through, and seek to do something, anthing to help the situation politically might not be so bad.  

Isn't that why Congress passed Trade Adjustment Assistance along with Trade Promotion Authority last year?  

And let's not forget the Trade Enforcement Act that was passed more recently.  

Barring systemic tax, regulatory, foreign commerce, and education reform, the only form of "trade assistance" is to depopulate manufacturing cities and pay for degrees. When the bureaucrats and well-meaning leftists design these bills, they think, "Wonderful! We will appropriate a massive sum of money for degree and everyone will go to work engineering solar panels and coding! Wonderful!"

The reality is, we pass TPP and 50,000 families are destroyed in their wake. After a few months, some suit from DC tries to convince you to move and enroll in some government program. Out of pride, community connections, and the life you've lived, you don't go. So we have just destroyed 50,000 without real, effective efforts to provide a future for them.

[Potus]

So the TAA is inadequate to the task -how would you improve upon it then?  What changes do you propose?  

Potus, can you elaborate upon what you said earlier about systemic reforms?

It's a bit of a conservative wish list. Our tax code is a disaster and needs shredded and redone. Our corporate rate is disastrous for jobs and growth. The lack of territorial taxation disadvantages US companies. Regulations with the force of law are enacted at will with no congressional oversight or attention paid to rules on the books or the necessity of the ruling. The economic impact of regulations are terrific and their quality of life improvements are small. We need to act like the strongest consumer market in the world. Our foreign commerce policies let China get away with large scale cheating and we don't ask for lower trade barriers proportional to the market access we provide to other nations. Our education system has been dry rotted by particularly powerful, particularly reform-allergic special interests and a bureaucracy, increasingly federal in nature, that is complicit in placing buzz words over learning and feelings over skills. Holding students to a competitive standard and opening the floodgates of innovation are the two big ingredients to our education reform recipe.

The list extends beyond this, too. Substance abuse has destroyed human and social capital in whole swathes of the country. Infrastructure decline has weakened the link between manufacturing and commerce. Our political rhetoric has shifted from a conversation about the distribution of the rising tide to the sharing and cutting of the existing pie. The system, the status quo, the Establishment, whatever you want to call it is an enemy of entrepreneurship and the American idea. Trade agreements are great things when we do them right, but TPP is going to have to wait until we can really dismantle the anti-growth, anti-prosperity status quo.