NAFTA should come up in this year's election. It was encouraged by Rube-publicans and lauded by Bill Clinton as he signed it into law.
From a letter to CBS Money Watch: Assessing the consequences of NAFTA, Mark Thoma says “For the U.S. – where the Bill Clinton administration sold the agreement as a job-creating policy because U.S. exports would grow by more than its imports – the agreement has not lived up to its promise” (“Is Donald Trump right to call NAFTA a ‘disaster’?” Oct. 5).
Disappointingly, Prof. Thoma writes as if he were a politician rather than the economist that he is. Politicians routinely sell freer trade as a source of net job and export creation. Yet economists since Adam Smith – and ranging across the ideological spectrum from Milton Friedman to Paul Krugman – have consistently rejected such claims as justifications for free trade. Economists understand that freer trade neither increases nor decreases the total number of jobs in an economy. Instead, freer trade changes the kinds of jobs performed in an economy by shifting jobs from industries that are comparatively inefficient to industries that are comparatively efficient.
From a letter to CBS Money Watch: Assessing the consequences of NAFTA, Mark Thoma says “For the U.S. – where the Bill Clinton administration sold the agreement as a job-creating policy because U.S. exports would grow by more than its imports – the agreement has not lived up to its promise” (“Is Donald Trump right to call NAFTA a ‘disaster’?” Oct. 5).
Disappointingly, Prof. Thoma writes as if he were a politician rather than the economist that he is. Politicians routinely sell freer trade as a source of net job and export creation. Yet economists since Adam Smith – and ranging across the ideological spectrum from Milton Friedman to Paul Krugman – have consistently rejected such claims as justifications for free trade. Economists understand that freer trade neither increases nor decreases the total number of jobs in an economy. Instead, freer trade changes the kinds of jobs performed in an economy by shifting jobs from industries that are comparatively inefficient to industries that are comparatively efficient.
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