Since 1989, the United States has enacted numerous free trade agreements with countries around the world. These agreements have increased trade, improved international relations, and strengthened the U.S. economy. But don’t let the facts stop a good political fight. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), enacted in 1993, inspires the most controversy. For example, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), in an exercise that stretches the logic of statistical analysis well past the breaking point, claims that the net loss of U.S. jobs due to NAFTA from 1993 to 2002 …
The March 3 working meeting between Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon and U.S. President Barack Obama loomed as a showdown over Mexico’s sputtering war against crime and increasingly prickly relations between Mexico and the U.S. The encounter, however, took a sunny turn when the two presidents agreed to focus on trade, regulation, and energy issues rather than come to dagger points over Mexico’s seemingly out-of-control crime war. The presidents agreed on a plan to settle a long-standing dispute over a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) commitment to allow a limited …
When the Mexican government imposed punitive tariffs last year on $2.4 billion in American products the average Mexican citizen may not have noticed. But no more. Try finding a U.S.-grown Christmas tree in Mexico City this week. They are scarce since Mexico’s usual suppliers of holiday evergreens, growers in the states of California and Oregon, have been priced out of the market by a 20 percent tariff. Oregon potato growers and Washington pear exporters are also singing the Christmas blues. No partridges in American-grown pear trees for Mexico this year. …
Participants at a recent conference in Washington blamed Mexico’s failure to achieve above-average economic growth in the past decade on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This criticism is unfair and unwise. The NAFTA agreement is one of the best examples in recent history of a successful, mainstream, and bipartisan project. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in the 15 years since NAFTA came into force annual U.S. trade with Canada and Mexico has tripled to nearly $1 trillion. More than 100,000 small and medium-sized U.S. firms now …
Today, President Obama is hosting a jobs summit at the White House with union bosses and corporate CEOs to discuss ways to accelerate job creation in the US. Noticeably absent are any representatives from the Chamber of Commerce or the National Federation of Independent Businesses, who represent most of the employers throughout the country. While not receiving invitations from the President might not stop everyone from attending events at the White House, the absence of the Chamber and NFIB reveal this summit for what it really is: just another PR …
Three years ago the U.S. finished negotiating a free trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia that would have given American businesses reciprocal access to the Colombian market that Colombian companies have been receiving for years. Two years later, in an unprecedented move, Speaker Pelosi denied the FTA an up or down vote in the House, stripping the agreement’s “fast track” procedural protections under the law. Despite calls for action, the Obama Administration has followed suit by failing to push the agreement forward. Now Canada has swooped in to lock in an …
If you support free markets, Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s Wall Street Journal op-ed makes for frightening reading: The U.S. hasn’t elected a genuinely protectionist president since Herbert Hoover, and for most of the last 80 years a rough bipartisan consensus has held that free trade is in the American national interest. The erosion of that consensus is reflected in the gulf between John McCain and Barack Obama on trade, which is probably the widest division at the presidential level since the 1920s. … Mr. Obama opposes the Colombia and South Korea …
Free trade has been receiving a bad rap lately. Barack Obama’s campaign has come out in full force against free trade. In addition to clumsily saying he would unilaterally renegotiate NAFTA (much to the chagrin of Canada and Mexico), during the third presidential debate Obama voiced opposition to the Colombian free trade agreement under the guise of “human rights.” Yet according to a recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal, labor union members, the contingent against whom human rights abuses have been aggressively exercised, are now much safer under Alvaro …
Barack Obama has frequently called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) “a bad deal.” During one Democratic primary debate, Obama even said he would unilaterally “use the hammer of a potential opt-out” to “renegotiate” the entire treaty. But after he secured the nomination, Obama changed his tune, admitting that NAFTA was not so bad after all, and telling Nina Easton: “Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified.” If you find Obama’s rhetoric on trade inconsistent, do not expect to learn much from his voting record either. He …
Responding to Barack Obama’s promise to unilaterally renegotiate NAFTA, President George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers chairman Michael Boskin writes in the Wall Street Journal: [S]ince Nafta was passed (relative to the comparable period before passage), U.S. manufacturing output grew more rapidly and reached an all-time high last year; the average unemployment rate declined as employment grew 24%; real hourly compensation in the business sector grew twice as fast as before; agricultural exports destined for Canada and Mexico have grown substantially and trade among the three nations has tripled; …
