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Trump: I'll Ditch TPP Trade Deal on Day One of My Presidency (arstechnica.com)
US President-elect Donald Trump has confirmed that the U.S. will pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) -- a trade deal involving 12 Pacific Rim nations -- "on day one" of his presidency. From a report on ArsTechnica: Trump, in a YouTube video outlining plans for his first 100 days in office, said: "I'm going to issue our notification of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potential disaster for our country." He added: "Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back on to American shores." An emphasis on bilateral trade deals may call into question both the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA), involving dozens of nations, and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Although the latter is between the US and the European Union, the complex political structure of the EU means that effectively 28 nations are involved and can influence the outcome of the deal. This was demonstrated by the dramatic intervention of the Walloon regional government in the signing of CETA, the bloc's trade deal with Canada.
They are already planning an Asian trade partnership under their leadership. (Forgot its name, look it up yourself.)
I would plan for a lot of this sort of thing from him. False shows of decisiveness. A lot of people seem to think that "doing something" is what a leader does, even if that "something" isn't well thought out or planned.
He doesn't know how to fix Obamacare but he'll "do something", lol.
I expect Trump to be worse than his base expects, but better than the melting down, hysterical media and left cries about.
*EVERYONE* here was bitching about TPP until Trump decided to do away with it.
Because Trump.
What replacement for Obamacare exactly? The one where you pay more and only save by not having medical procedures done?
If there are truly bad aspects to the TPP, then spell those out
Electronic Frontier Foundation has spelled out the TPP's truly bad aspects in a category of articles on its site.
... not Trump.
They weren't going to approve it anyway.
It's like Trump declaring that, on day one, he'll adjust the atmospheric composition to be 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Is the right pro, or against globalization? I thought free trade capitalism was an economic right-wing staple. It was only the looney leftist occupy-wall-street nutters that were against free trade.
For years up to a week ago: TPP is an abomination love child between Hitler and Satan and needs to die.
Now that Trump doesn't want it: This will ruin the nation and will only benefit China. TPP Must Go Forward!
Bernie Sanders' supporter here. I didn't vote on Nov. 8th, because I simply couldn't back a lobbyist like Clinton. By killing the TPP, and maybe also TiSA and TTIP, Trump has just taken the most progressive political choice in the last 40 years, it's the first real reversal of the globalization process, something unthinkable until a few years ago. Clinton would have surely "renegotiated" the TPP, and after few useless and cosmetic changes, passed it. After all, it was "the gold standard" for her. Obama himself wanted it, and he's technically supposed to be more progressive than Clinton.
Surely I don't like many of Trump's proposals (slash taxes also for the rich, "clean" coal...), but on trade he could be the most "leftist" president in decades.
Instead of complaining, next time choose the right candidate at the Democratic primaries.
Without the TPP, Congress could roll back Hollywood's bought and paid for copyright law changes. For example, Congress could make some of the exemptions from anti-circumvention law pursuant to LoC's triennial rulemaking permanent. Or it could expand compulsory licenses for orphan works. Or it could establish an "Eminent Public Domain" program that allows free use of a work of authorship while compensating its author, by estimating a copyright's fair market value and letting the people crowdfund a "taking" pursuant to the Fifth Amendment.
But with the TPP, Congress's hands would be tied.
Well Trump is throwing out one prospective trade deal and substituting other prospective trade deals without actually modifying current trade relations in any way. So this looks like a prima facie attempt to honor a campaign promise without, in fact, making a change. Either his anti-trade campaign messages were empty demagogic promises or his new Republican allies educated him on trade.
The latter would be a good thing. People's intuitions about trade are often mistaken:
- They believe that employment is zero sum, that is, that the total number of jobs is fixed, so that if a foreigner gains a job, a U.S. citizen must necessarily lose a job. This is incorrect. Foreigners to not "steal" jobs from Americans. In fact, global employment levels can and do fluctuate.
- They overlook that every producer is also a consumer. If you are employed and make something and sell it, you then have an income with which to purchase goods and services produced by others. As with employment, global production and consumption are variable, not fixed. The more people work, the more goods there are to go around. "Getting rid of those foreign slackers," is just as disdainful of others as "Those damn foreigners are stealing our jobs," but, pragmatically, is more likely to lead to socially beneficial policy outcomes. Consider improvements in the quality of life and reduction in our tax burden if Africans had productive jobs instead instead of relying on the industrialized world to support them with foreign aid.
- They are unaware of the law of comparative advantage, which tells us that both those with an absolute advantage and those with an absolute disadvantage benefit from trade. The naive and incorrect assumption is that those producers with an absolute advantage displace all others.
- They forget that trade is an exchange. They give us stuff and we give them stuff in exchange. To give them stuff, we have to have stuff to give them. Who makes that stuff? Employees. You can not trade goods without having domestic employees to manufacture the goods which you produce to trade.
- They are unaware of the balance of payments and fear that all the money will end up abroad. Foreigners hoarding cash is a benefit to the U.S., because when foreigners hoard U.S. dollars they give us cars, televisions, and computers and all we have given them in trade is little pieces of paper with drawings of our presidents. Less that beneficial-to-us cash hoarding, over time all purchases are reciprocated, so that for every sale to the United States by a foreign entity there is a sale to the foreign entity by from the U.S. There has to be, because when we buy something from a foreign nation the foreigners are left holding U.S. cash which is only of value if spent in the U.S., or traded to someone else. That someone else can only exchange U.S. cash with others or redeem it for U.S. goods. If it is traded abroad perpetually and never redeemed, that is cash hoarding and we benefit.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
That's my view completely. Western economies are in many transition, and really, have been for a while. If I blame governments for anything, it's for not better preparing workers in these areas for the decline, and for the what they will do in the post-decline. The fact is that the pace of automation has been picking up for several decades now, and the vision of many industries has been to minimize the number of workers on the floor. In some cases, like Japan, this has as much to do with a shrinking population and a lack of actual workers, but in other jurisdictions, it is really about profitability. Even Foxxcon is retooling in China, with more automation, which means all those Asians that the Trump squad believe stole their jobs will soon be on the unemployment line themselves.
I grew up and still live in a manufacturing town in British Columbia, here it's forestry. When my father got his job at a sawmill in the late 1960s, the mill itself employed something like 700-900 people. When the first major retooling came in the late 1970s, with the then state of the art computers, there were significant job losses. The recession of the early 1980s saw those numbers drop due to economic circumstances, and by the time the economy recovered, most of the lost jobs never came back. Now, forty years after the first automation systems were brought in, the mill has less than one hundred full time employees (I think it's below 80 now), and each iteration brings that number down. In my town, the only real solution has been a drop in population, which is normal.
In reality, the town's population had grown massively during the 1940s as the forest industry became a major employer, but of course for many of the workers in their 50s, who came in to the industry at the cusp of the changes, they don't see the big picture, that they came in at the end of a manufacturing bubble, and they do the same thing up here in Canada that Trump's supporters do in the States, just lash out at the immigrants and the Asians. They want to hear politicians that will tell them nice fantasies about how the elites are out to get them, because that's better than facing the fact that, at the end of the day, we all have to bear responsibility for our life choices, and any of us who found good pay in what amounts to a relatively low skill position, well, that was lucky, but the luck has run out, and no amount of posturing by politicians will make those jobs come back.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.