What about the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement now?

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My concern is that now with Congress under full control of the Republican Party the Trans Pacific Partnership (free trade treaty) will be put on the fast track. President Obama wanted this to happen for a while but Senator Harry Reid has slowed it down significantly


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership

Ross Perot may have been easy to categorize as a nut but he was absolutely right about NAFTA while Senator Bob Dole and President Bill Clinton were absolutely wrong about it.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnew...ioritize-passage-of-trans-pacific-partnership

Politics, the saying goes, makes strange bedfellows. In presidential politics, the cozy compromises with the unconstitutional seem even more unsettling.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a man whose personal popularity and political fortunes have increased in direct proportion to his spreading of his libertarian-leaning ideals, has now publicly embraced the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an unprecedented sovereignty surrender masquerading as a multi-national trade pact.

Paul’s speech coincided with the TPP ministerial meeting conducted October 19-24 in Sydney, Australia.

As you can see the TPP free trade treaty has some detractors. I think it's funny that almost no major news outlets have mentioned it much to my knowledge while it does seem to have some concerning provisions. I have also not seen it mentioned often enough on Anandtech forums imo.

All I know is this. NAFTA has not been beneficial to the American Economy and I highly doubt that the TPP would be either.



So while Harry Reid can be legitimately criticized I believe that he did the right thing in not allowing the TPP to go forward as quickly as President Obama wanted.

This is something that will have to be watched carefully no matter where you stand on politics imo.


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[Fanatical Meat]

Agreed trade treaties need to be debated to become effective. All of them hurt US workers. I can't figure out why Obama was for this at first he has nothing to gain in it. I also am concerned that there really hasn't been news coverage and its difficult to see who supports it and who does not support it.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

If Global Labor Arbitrage impoverished the lower classes while enriching the top 5%, the Republicans would not bat an eye. It's not like they oppose work visas that already displace Americans from domestic jobs.

 

[Auric]

All I know is this. NAFTA has not been beneficial to the American Economy and I highly doubt that the TPP would be either.

If not beneficial has it been detrimental, and how so (without confusing employment with output)?

 

[cubby1223]

U.S. workers have better salaries and better working conditions than Asian workers. Continual advancements in communication and transportation technologies serve to balance them out, building up cheap foreign labor while dragging down the more expensive U.S. labor until a balance is achieved.

The internet has greatly accelerated this process.

I'll be the first to admit I'm not acknowledged enough to comment on this partnership with any expertise. Does the TPP accelerate, or decelerate what is naturally happening? Most of the world's product manufacturing already happens outside of the U.S., the importance of the U.S. labor force to the world has already been greatly diminished before this topic came up. The U.S. worker has been taking a shellacking over the past couple decades, and will continue to do so for some time to come, it is inevitable.

So the question is, in this new global economy we are in, given all the other factors that are driving down expensive U.S. labor, does this agreement provide a net benefit or net loss in the long-term?

I'm not going to choose a position based on the volume level of activists.

 

[DCal430]

We don't need more trade treaties we need less of them. We need to declare some older economic treaties such as GATT to be voided. These so called treaties only benefit the rich at the expense of everyone else.