Questions about the TPP

The TTP was created by the new world order folks to get control over the Pacific rim. It's a treaty with all these Pacific nations like Vietnam , Philippines , Korea, etc. I don't think Americans want any more NWO crap. This looked like a bad deal. It gave corporations power over our own government as they would have their own court that could over rule ours.
The one world government guys are definitely on the outside looking in but don't count them out.
Also as a result now China will set the policy in the pacific rim and they are communists don't forget. They aren't real concerned with human rights.They don't care about environmental issues. And they already have built islands thereby extending their territorial waters by hundreds of miles blocking a main shipping lane. A hostile posture condemned by the UN.
But what the hell , f the NWO , right ?

 

they actually cant trade that well with China. The Chinese dont have the purchasing power to buy stuff at the prices to make this work. Unlike americans.

Which is why rcep is dumb. All the nations involved are the ones people outsource too. Theres no consumer nation. Contrast to NAFTA where you had mexico (producer) US and Canada (consumer)

 

Well, but the benefits of the TPP (no tariffs or non-tariff barriers) could be taken away, as per contract, if the participating country doesn't meet the environmental, labor and human rights standards. This is an incentive for nations to raise their standards (and level the playing field with respect to the US), in order to be able to not lose the benefits from trade. I see nothing wrong with that.

Now, what are your issues with the TPP?

 

like i said. Supposing a tpp country like vietnam has to raise its standards but a non tpp country like malaysia or i dunno ghana doesnt wouldnt we buy the product frmo ghana? After all we are looking for the cheapest product in your scenario. Its not like we are not part of WTO or have other bilateral things.

 

The benefits of offshoring are that goods can be made cheaper, and presumably sold cheaper as well, benefiting the consumer. But the idea that tariffs would make things more expensive is based on something previously made and sold in the US at one price, then made overseas and sold in the US for a cheaper price. A tariff on that same product to reimport back into the US as a penalty would presumably raise the price to it's previous domestic price. So yes, that percentage of of the tariff would raise prices for that product, however the bigger role would be a tariff making the difference in whether a company moves production overseas or not. If the only value to moving production overseas is to lower your labor costs, it seems to me that would discourage that sort of move.

It's a trade off. You can have cheap crap at Wal-Mart to buy with your welfare and unemployment, or slightly pricer stuff that you pay for with wages.

Well I would have fallen in line with the economist point of view years ago. In 1994, without the example of NAFTA it made sense to me, and I bought the Wall Street Journal's assurances, that comparative advantage, over time would result in a more efficient economy with cheaper goods and more jobs. And some of that came true. But it's over 20 years later and we have abundant data on on the massive job loss and hollowing out of the middle class we've suffered since then. Some jobs were created, but not nearly enough to replace the ones lost, and the ones that came later were either minimum wage type jobs or jobs that require lots of training and skill. It does nothing to tell a 50 year old guy with a kid in college and a mortgage that "heh, so you lost your manufacturing job, go learn code." He's not going to become a coder at 50.

Of course, outsourcing is only part of the problem. Automation is the long term bigger issue that doesn't even provide a policy alternative like outsourcing does. So that was my epiphany; we need to treat "good jobs" like a diminishing natural resource. To that end, we shouldn't be exporting the jobs or importing the workers for the remaining ones.

 

If the added cost of increasing standards would outweigh the benefits from reduced tariffs, then yes.

However, this is not the main point. What is you specific issue with the TPP?

I am actually not for the TPP, I am just trying to understand people's thinking. From what I can gather from this thread, nobody knows nothing. Trump supporters just celebrate the pulling out of the TPP, because they FEEL it is bad. But then they want low corporate tax rates. That's a contradiction in itself. And nobody has explained it to me yet. Maybe I am too dense to get it, but I rather suspect that the Trump fans don't know how to resolve that contradiction for themselves.

 

Fully agree with what you said, domestic labor must be protected. But that's a "socialist" point of view.

The next questions then are: Why the disdain for the unions? They also try to fight for domestic labor and living wages? Why the disdain for minimum wage? Again, that would put money in people's pockets and raise demand? You see where your socialist views on trade are leading you?

 

As I mentioned in a previous comment, tariffs are not socialist and were the basis of the economic growth of the early United States.

As for unions and minimum wage, I don't believe I mentioned them.

 

Not it isn't...how do you figure that?

It's not disdain for any of that it is government overreach into the market.

 

Maybe you didn't mention unions, but now that we are at it, do you support therm?

As for tariffs not being socialist, they are actually just another form of tax. Just read your previous posts in this thread. If Bernie Sanders had written them, you'd probably be up in arms about it.

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And tariffs are not government overreach into the market? Why not?

 

Back in 2015 the Huffington Post wrote an article with the title: "Why the Trans-Pacific Partnership Is Bad for Workers, and for Democracy" - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heather-gautney/why-the-transpacific-part_1_b_6598604.html

So we now live in a world where:
1. A trade policy is condemned by the mantle of the left
2. Trump cancelled it.
3. The left now criticizes him for doing so.

The world is upside-down.

 

Oh bs it is blatantly obvious, TPP, as it currently stands, is a suckers agreement with the US playing the role of chief sucker. We get almost nothing from it that we don't already have while essentially ratifying China's to play Bully boy in the South China Sea.

 

You want to derail your own thread?

Heh, whatever...

Unions: American unions are not like German unions. They are basically criminal organizations in the US that define themselves in opposition to whatever management wants, and has destroyed every industry that it's dominated. It's US record is absolutely terrible. Although as a legal matter, I support the right of unions to organize, I oppose making them mandatory.

Minimum wage is one of our more idiotic policy innovations. It sounds great, but if you could really raise the wages of the lowest skilled and experienced workers with no consequence, why not raise it to 50 bucks an hour? Make everyone middle class. The reason why you won't raise the minimum wage to $50 an hour is basically a sliding scale of why they help some, and hurt a lot more.

 

I'm not criticizing him, I just don't understand why conservatives all of a sudden cite pieces from the huffpo as evidence for good policy. Only because Trump says it?

But, again, maybe you can chime in on your problems with the TPP, with your own ideas about it, not because someone else said it is good or bad.

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Minimum wage raises prices, tariffs raise prices. What's the difference? Why support one and not the other? I still don't get it.

 

I can explain it at a democrat level. Turn your apple juice over. Its from china. As a U.S. citizen...silly me but I prefer regulations to be cut here so that my apples will be grown here and turned into juice here for obvious reasons. Now you tell me why it's better for me to drink juice from china, where regulations are a joke, pay the same price anyways and put my fellow Americans out of work while I employ chinese which hurts our economy and helps theirs?
Other than because that treasonous sentiment is what leftists love...please explain why it's better for me

 

You sound just like a liberal democrat. It's the song they've been singing for years. I didn't buy it then either.

 

This is the same problem with tariffs. Exactly the same problem.

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I would love to hear the answer to this too. It was terrible policy when bernie was backing it and it's terrible now!

 

It's not necessary for trade, and far too rigid. In an ideal world, trade is between producer and consumer.

It gets the government out of the way of trade.

What barriers are there now? Only those that governments introduce to protect their markets.

The TPP is not unregulated free market as the free market is the starting point of free trade. It's only when governments get involved that free trade becomes regulated trade.

It hasn't gone through congress so no need to pull out of the agreement via congress.

My main objection to TPP is that it would have made it almost impossible to renegotiate or renege on once passed. Also, it involves trust with countries like China that are untrustworthy. They don't respect intellectual property rights now, so why would we want to enter into an agreement with them that requires trusting them? The vast majority of counterfeit goods are manufactured in China.

It would also mean allowing temporary foreign workers to come here which isn't something we need. Like everything else in the tpp, that can be negotiated on a case-by-case basis, rather than one huge formal trade agreement written in stone.

At the end of the day, I trust Trump to make good smart deals, and the TPP was negotiated by Obama who I don't trust at all.

 

Maybe you should try to lower yourself to "democrat level" to see past you misconceptions.

So, why is it better to drink the juice from China? The economist would argue with the principle of comparative advantage. If it is cheaper to produce in China than in the US, China is basically subsidizing the US economy by selling their labor under value.

BTW: About the "treasonous sentiment". I stated several times in this thread that I do not support the TPP, but I guess you didn't read that. You just made assumptions about me and then regurgitated Trumpist talking points.

As a reminder, this thread is not about TPP good or bad, but why free market advocates oppose the TPP and support tariffs.

Here is, btw, an article from the Mises institute which calls upon this republican hypocrisy. It is a good read:

https://mises.org/library/tariffs-welfare-state-economics

 

By subsidize you mean put Americans out of work right? I love leftist sweater wearing professor explanations. Sounds good....meanwhile the American worker is suffering, losing their homes, jobs and way of life under the leftist economists solution. Great job last 8 year dems...and you wonder why you lost. Trump did more to help America in 2 days than Obama did in 8 round trips around the sun.

 

We could manufacture those things in the US at China's cost if we wanted to. The problem is that we don't want to. We want to put some restrictions like minimum wage, child labor, pollution, workplace safety, etc. etc. etc.

Without all the regulations we want, we could just transport one of those giant krupp sized manufacturing cities over to someplace like Detroit, complete with Chinese workers. Same lack of regulations, and then those products would be made here. Then we could talk about comparative advantage.

The problem is that we aren't talking comparative advantage now. A toilet plunger made in the states is not the same toilet plunger made in China because we demand that the people who make MIA toilet plungers be treated differently from people who make MIC toilet plungers. The product may look exactly the same, and operate in exactly the same manner, but one was produced using ethical standards that we demand for our own workers, but not for Chinese workers. You can't discount the morality involved in the manufacturing process.

There is also the morality of national interests to consider. If I have a lawn to mow, do I give the job to my son? Or do I give it to some illegal alien who I would rather see forcibly evicted from the country and sent packing to wherever he came from. If I give the job to my son, I am teaching him the value of a dollar. If I give it to the illegal alien, I am teaching him the value of breaking our laws. Maybe my son will demand more than the illegal alien, but that money is helping my family, whereas it would be hurting my family if I gave it to somebody else. It's just money gone, an opportunity to make some money gone, a lesson on the value of honest work gone.

The mowed lawn or the toilet plunger is not the only desirable end result.

 

You are ignorant of reality about four-fifths of the manufacturing jobs that have been lost have been lost to automation

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There are five million jobs ready and waiting to be filled go get one

 

Really? I'm a bit surprised. I thought you had some sort of economic background.

Increasing prices isn't the mechanism in which jobs are saved.

Tariffs save jobs by eliminating the benefits of outsourcing jobs.

Minimum wage cost jobs because:

a) they are aimed at the lowest skilled and least experienced, there very people who most likely are not worth hiring at a higher than market level wage

b) a lot of small employers who hire minimum wage workers have extremely thin profit margins

c) kiosks

 

Seriously? You can't discern the difference between domestic overreach and trade with other countries? Why not?

 

It really was a bs law! We didn't feel the effects until around 2004. Clinton tricked us. Stuff like that is why we as voters need to take the time to understand as much as possible about the laws and policies the politicians introduce. If that means staying up all night after working 16 hours to read up on what things are. Wake up!!