The BS Talking Point That Trump's Trade Policy Is Leftist - Its Not.
There is a popular talking point that Trump's anti-trade policy is leftist. It is not. Likewise, there is a talking point that belief in multi-lateral trade agreements is Republican. Of course, that is not true since NAFTA and TPP were negotiated under Democratic Presidents.
What is true is that there is a temptation on both the left and the right to scapegoat immigrants and foreign trade. For example, Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs has long been an opponent of trade agreements, as well as immigration. This idea that Trump is some notable exception among Republicans on trade is just BS. President Hoover, a Republican, was the architect of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that precipitated the Great Depression. Since then, Patrick Buchanan, Lou Dobbs, and now Trump have used foreign trade to gain political support from the working class.
http://buchanan.org/blog/trump-is-right-on-trade-124822
Republican hawks are aflutter today over China’s installation of anti-aircraft missiles on Woody Island in the South China Sea.
But do these Republicans, good free-traders all, realize their own indispensable role in converting an indigent China into the mighty and menacing power that seeks to push us out of Asia?
Last year, China ran up the largest trade surplus in history, at our expense, $365 billion. We exported $116 billion in goods to China. China exported $482 billion worth of goods to us.
Using Census Bureau statistics, Terry Jeffrey of CNSNEWS.com documents how Beijing has, over decades, looted and carted off the greatest manufacturing base the world had ever seen.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/28/dobbs.testimony/index.html
Congress is being called upon this year to renew fast-track authority, and the Bush administration, as it did five years ago, is insisting that Congress continue to cede its Constitutional power and responsibility of trade policymaking and to renew so-called "fast-track" trade promotional authority, which diminishes Congressional prerogative and reduces representation of domestic interest in the name of so-called "free trade."
As I've already pointed out, free trade has been the most expensive trade policy this nation has ever pursued. There is nothing free about ever-larger trade deficits, mounting trade debts and the loss of millions of good-paying American jobs.
Since the beginning of this new century, the United States has lost more than three million manufacturing jobs. Three million more jobs have been lost to cheap overseas labor markets as corporate America campaigns relentlessly for "higher productivity, "efficiency," and "competitiveness," all of which have been revealed to be nothing more than code words for the cheapest possible labor in the world.
Corporate America and our country's political elites have combined to put this country's middle-class working men and women into direct competition with the world's cheapest labor. Salaries and wages now represent the lowest share of our national income than any time since 1929. Corporate profits have the largest share of our national income than at any time since 1950.
The pursuit of so-called free trade has resulted in the opening of the world's richest consumer market to foreign competitors without negotiating a reciprocal opening of world markets for U.S. goods and services. That isn't free trade by any definition, whether that of classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo or that of current propaganda ministers who use the almost Orwellian term to promote continuation of the trade policies followed for the last three decades.
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