John Engler in today’s WSJ: [1]
It is amazing how some presidential candidates are blaming the North American Free Trade Agreement for U.S. job losses. They seem to believe that a substantial part of the three million manufacturing jobs lost since 2000 resulted from Nafta, and that outsourcing of manufacturing production to Mexico and Canada resulted in a huge trade deficit.
Too bad they don’t know that the growth in the deficit isn’t due to manufactured goods, but to oil and gas imports.
There is no question that the imbalance of trade within Nafta has soared since 2000. That deficit has almost doubled to nearly $140 billion in 2007, from $77 billion in 2000. But the deficit in manufactured goods did not displace U.S. factory production.
What the antitrade advocates have been hiding from the candidates (or maybe don’t know themselves) is that almost all of the increase in our Nafta deficit since 2000 has been in increased U.S. imports of energy from Canada and Mexico. In fact, $58 billion of the $62 billion increase in our Nafta deficit has been in energy imports. That’s 95% of the total increase.
Except for energy, though, our trade deficit within Nafta has hardly grown at all – only $3.5 billion from 2000-2007. Our agricultural and manufactured goods sales to Nafta countries have just about kept pace with our imports. That’s a lot more than one can say about the rest of our foreign trade.
Quite correct. So not only does this blow away the anti-free trade arguments being put forward by the left… and particularly by both Obama and Clinton… this also points the fickle finger of blame for the trade deficit directly the the major source of the problem… The Democrats… who have continually prevented us from drilling for oil and gas here in the US
Isn’t it time we as a nation stopped taking the advce of the Demorats on these issues?