March 08, 2015
My mistake, Will said record exports, but of course both are true, and in the real world (as opposed to the Washington Post opinion pages) it is the net that matters, and that has soared into negative territory in the last two decades. But, I don’t won’t to get into the sort of arithmetic that is clearly over Will and his editors’ heads.
Just to explain the logic, many of our manufacturing exports are items are assembled overseas to be re-imported back to the United States. For example, if we export the car parts to an assembly plant in Mexico, instead of sending them to be assembled in Ohio, we have a big increase in U.S. exports. Fortunately for the state of U.S. manufacturing, our autoworkers understand that this does not create jobs in the United States. Unfortunately for those trying to push trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), our autoworkers understand that this does not create jobs in the United States.
Will gets some other points in his piece wrong. He repeatedly refers to the TPP as a “free trade” agreement. Perhaps he added the word “free” to meet his word quota at the WaPo, but it is not accurate. The deal does not seek to free all trade. For example, it will do little or nothing to open up trade in the services of doctors, dentists, and lawyers and other highly paid professionals. That could save consumers hundreds of billions a year and provide a large boost to growth. But these groups have enough power that they can ensure the protectionist barriers that support their high pay remain in place.
The deal also quite explicitly seeks to increase protectionist barriers in the form of patent and copyright protection. These barriers have the same effect on markets as tariffs in the hundreds or even thousands of percents. It is wrong to call a deal with large increases in protection a “free trade” pact.
Anyhow, this is the WaPo opinion page, so no one expects much by the way of accuracy, but even by WaPo standards, Will is stretching it.
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