60,000 Factories lost due to trade deals.
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Democrat
Colorado Springs, CO
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There is a reason that Ed Schultz was fired from MSNBC. He was pretty loose with the facts. Okay, let me share some facts: NAFTA: NAFTA was negotiated under President George H. W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and Mexican President Carlos Salinas, each responsible for spearheading and promoting the agreement, ceremonially signed the agreement in their respective capitals on December 17, 1992. The House of Representatives passed the Act on November 17, 1993, 234-200. The agreement's supporters included 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats. The bill passed the Senate on November 20, 1993, 61-38. Senate supporters were 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats. Clinton signed it into law on December 8, 1993; the agreement went into effect on January 1, 1994. Clinton Years: In 1992, the year before Bill Clinton became president, 10 million Americans were unemployed, the country faced record deficits, and poverty and welfare rolls were growing. Family incomes were losing ground to inflation and jobs were being created at the slowest rate since the Great Depression. After President Clinton took office, economic growth averaged 4.0 percent per year, compared to average growth of 2.8 percent during the Reagan-Bush years. The economy grew for 116 consecutive months, the most in history. The Clinton economy created more than 22.5 million jobs, —the most jobs ever created under a single administration, and more than were created in the previous 12 years. Of the total new jobs, 20.7 million, or 92 percent, are in the private sector. When Bill Clinton left office, the unemployment rate was 4.4 percent. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Okay if I wanted to play the Ed Schultz game (or your game), I would just leave it there and let you draw your own conclusions on how NAFTA affected American jobs. However, determining jobs lost versus jobs gained under NAFTA is far more complex. As I have read numerous reports by noted economists with an unbiased perspective, quantifying the net effect of jobs by NAFTA is nearly impossible because of all the other effects which collectively were much greater than the effect of NAFTA. As I wrote in my blog article, What is really happening to jobs in America, Automation and the advent of faster and smaller computers is certainly the biggest “job changer”, but also implementation of improved productivity measures, market forces and competition, supply and demand of consumer products and services, booms and busts (bubbles), e-commerce and internet shopping, tax policies that reward companies that ship jobs overseas, corporate policies on wages and benefits, government tax and spending programs (e.g. stimulus vs austerity), changing demographics of the work force (e.g. millennials vs baby boomers), retirements, part time work, and, of course, political shenanigans in Congress by the Party of ‘Hell No You Can’t’. The bottom line from economists is that NAFTA had a negligible NET effect on jobs. Some jobs were lost and some gained, but the net effect overall is seen as positive on the economy. And now you're talking like the Commodities Futures Modernization Act caused 60,000 jobs to be lost. Wow. To put the CFMA into perspective, H.R. 5660 (the "CFMA") was consolidated into H.R. 4577, the "Consolidated Appropriations Act for FY 2001". The House passed the Conference Report and, therefore, H.R. 4577 in a vote of 292-60. The Senate passed the Conference Report, and therefore H.R. 4577, by "unanimous consent." Bill Clinton signed H.R. 4577, including H.R. 5660, into law on December 21, 2000 when Congress had already left on Christmas vacation. President's usually don't veto appropriations bills right before Christmas even if it contains things the president doesn't like. Yes there are parts of the CFMA that were snuck in by Phil Graham at the last minute, but the CFMA was not a stand alone law; it was passed as a part of the yearend appropriations act, much like Congress does every year consolidating legislation at budget crunch time. Oh and when Barack Obama took office in January 2009, the economy was shedding 700,000 jobs a month!
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Democrat
Colorado Springs, CO
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Chet -- I was trying to add some perspective on the jobs lost due to factory closures and trade deals. Factories close for a variety of reasons, but the favorite whipping post of unions is trade deals. The Union funded EPI says 600,000 jobs were lost to NAFTA, but that number is highly disputed by neutral economists. The net job loss due to NAFTA is near zero. On the other hand, in 2008 and early 2009, 5.2 million jobs were lost due to the economic conditions of the Great Recession. Here's what I wrote in my blog article from May 2015, The Strategy behind the “Party of No” to obstruct job growth: "To refresh people’s memories, on the day that President Obama took office, the economy was in a nosedive, and jobs were being shed at the rate of 700,000 jobs per month. The election year 2008 alone saw the loss of 3.6 million jobs, the worst year for job losses since 1939, when the statistics started being kept. Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman declared in January 2009 that the United States was “headed for another Great Depression”. It sure appeared that way as an additional 1.6 million jobs were lost in the first two months of 2009 before Obama could get approval of an economic stimulus package to halt the carnage and start turning the economy around." Ed Schultz never seems to delve into exactly how or why these jobs were really lost. Rather the focus is always on trade deals and how bad they are for the country; and all manufacturing jobs lost are somehow attributed to trade deals. That's where I disagree with my union friends, Bernie Sanders and Ed Schultz. Oh and to correct you, gasoline prices in January 2009 had dived to $1.79 a gallon.
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Democrat Hot Springs Village, AR
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Democrat Hot Springs Village, AR
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