southamerican free trade agreement circling the drainFollow

it is a sad state of affairs when a two bit gurella thug can hold more clout in trade agreement talks than the president of the united states.

that is how low our international standing has fallen.

the moral majority working....hard.....for you.

Fixed!

(even the spelling of Guerilla)

I hope we all realize that free trade in South America will cripple it more as a nation, and more effectively, than any invasion ever could. An invasion might almost be preferable. Downward pressure on prices would have no boarder tarriffs to off-set production demands that could compete in both north and south america. This would mean that wages would plummet and the south american economy would be even further crippled, tied to the US and its 200 billion dollar deficit. Ick. Free trade has destroyed Mexico's ability to control its domestic wage minimum, it is ruining welfare programes in Canada, and all we see of benefit to the US is that the top 5 % get a great deal richer.

Free trade is a bad idea for a nation, but a great idea for the business men who control it.

You do know there's an edit function, right?



How is this bad for South America? I'm serious here. The cost of living is vastly higher in the US then in say Venezuella. That means that a good that is well priced at a buck in Venezuella will go for 20 bucks in the US. That's pure profit potential for Venezuelian businesses. It means that those same business owners can pay their workers higher wages for the same amount of work and still make a profit.

The biggest fear isn't falling prices, but inflationary price changes in South America as a result. But in this case, the good far outweighs the bad.




Again. How do you suppose this will happen? How are wages in South America going to plummet if we open up trade a bit more between them and the US? News flash! Prices are *higher* in the US then in South America. The likely result is US dollars flowing into South America to get cheaper goods. That will *increase* the prices of those goods over time in South America and the cost of labor to produce them. That's what happens when you increase demand as a result of lifting trade barriers.

Why on earth do you suppose so many people are afraid that Cafta will cause jobs in the US to move south? US businesses could open up factories in South America (where it's cheaper to operate), pay a relatively high local wages for workers (but still less then they'd pay for medicre workers in the US), and make a profit in the process. That will *not* result in decreased wages. It'll increase them over time south of the border.

And what the hell does the US deficit have to do with a trade agreement? Nothing in this case at least...



Odd. I'd swear that Mexico's economy has stabilized quite a bit since NAFTA came along. Not sure about wellfare programs in Canada, but it's not like there isn't some ******** on this side of the border on that issue as well. Opening up trade requires compromises from all sides. That's the whole point. The idea is that the long term result is better then the short term negatives. So far, I've not seen the sky fall as a result.



I see. And what's good for business is bad for a national economy? You'll have a hard time convincing me of that one.

The biggest loss of jobs will be among unskilled laborers - people working in factories for the most part.

Being a misanthropic nationalist, I've always felt that American workers should worry less about jobs like those leaving, and take the time and effort to train harder. There is always a market for skilled work. There are a great many fields where one's personal talent will allow them to be employable. Working a factory line isn't it.

Industrial factories pollute. The conditions are usually lame. Injuries are too common. The wages paid are low. This is work anyone can do, including the illiterate, including those who can't all speak the language of the factory boss - it's damn near modern slavery. I can't imagine why we'd want to keep these kinds of jobs in-house instead of outsourcing them to another group of people.

It isn't that I wish ill will on people in other countries; technically this is a "win-win" arrangement, as they'd be getting steady work for higher pay with better benefits than they do traditionally in their countries. This is a chance for the bottom of the South American barrel to move upward.


At least, that's the idealized view.

The reality is that a lot of the Americans working our factories are functionally illiterate. Most are stuck doing that kind of work because they have no talent to use doing anything else. There are people with no drive, no desire, and if we take the factories away, we're creating a new class of unemployed people. Worse - we're stuck realizing that they're unemployable in most any other business.

If only there were a way to ship the workers south with the factories! That would be a true win-win.


edit: I'm not talking about Ford making cars. I'm talking about factories that make nothing but doors - endless rows of screen doors! - or perhaps factories that manufacture aluminum siding. I've known people that worked in both, and I think losing them in South America somewhere would improve this nation quite a bit.

Edited, Tue Nov 8 14:46:47 2005 by Wingchild

Actually engineering jobs are starting to be sent overseas as well. It's not just crappy jobs as some would like to think.

This would use tax dollars though. Something most pubes would use against such a strategy.

First off, let me say that I vote for the pyrimid idea. Seems sensible and oh so practical!




Yeah. But I'm also of the opinion that this frees our labor force to do "better" things (or at least more productive things). In the early 80s, when Reagan kicked the car companies around, and pushed the steel unions around a bit as well, a lot of american factory workers lost their jobs. They'd been clinging like crazy to their long term union jobs at the local factory and didn't want to do anything different. But this was killing our economy (car companies nearly going bust) due to the stagnation of the industry. They retrained. Most of them went into building ICs instead of cars. 10 years later we have the computer boom (about 95, right?). Not a coincidence. Sometimes, you need and want to push labor from doing the "simple" things that we already know how to do an anyone else could do it too, to the more difficult things.

No one ever likes when it happens, but it is necessary for a long term healthy economy.



Semantics. A business is affected exactly to the degree to which it deals with cross border factors. What you call that is irrelevant. It's about markets and expansion. And I think you'll have a hard time finding a negative correlary between how well business does (call it "big business if you insist) and how the GDP of the US economy as a whole does. The fact is very much that "business" affects us all. Whether you believe it or not.


You also make a common mistake of assuming that jobs that are outsourced represent an actual or even relative loss of jobs here in the US. Absolutely not true. Outsourced jobs represent expansion of business into those new areas. The number of brand new job positions that open up in the US each year more then make up for those. It doesn't affect the whole trickle down thing one bit because it does not represent a loss of wages locally. What it does represent is an increase in profits for businesses, which in turn means increased productivity, a greater increase in quality of life, etc...


And it's that last bit that everyone misses. How many products do you own right now that did not exist at all 30 years ago? You walk around with a cell phone? You have an iPod with your music? How about your home CD player and your DVD surround sound entertainment system? Even though you may not earn a single penny in wages from the companies that developed, marketed, and sold those products, you reap the benefits for them having done it. Where do you think the money to develop those things came from? Yup. The profit margins of those "evil" big corporations.


That's the part that most people totally miss about the whole "trickle down" concept. It's not just about the numbers and the money. It's about overall quality of life. And you can't measure that on a balance sheet.