Obama News Conference

[Eric5273]

Originally Posted by JCL

You are focusing on Mexico. You should focus on your largest trading partner. And if you want to focus on Mexico, you should talk about textile jobs (and the accompanying legislation on origin) and dumping cheap agricultural products into Mexico, and not just on factories.

When did Burma join NAFTA? Must have missed it.

You just disproved your own argument re NAFTA causing an economic slide in the US. First you said that slide had gone on for 22 years. Now you say that US wage decline has gone on for 40 years. Once again, NAFTA came along in 1992.

Your turn. Time to bring the WTO and corporate elite into it, I think.

The general concept of NAFTA (and all the other "free trade" agreements) is not a problem. But there should have been provisions added to exclude countries which do not have proper labor laws and living wages. As I pointed out in my example of Burma, we cannot "compete" with some countries, and should not be expected to.

NAFTA certainly did not cause the problems. If you want to get technical, Capitalism is what caused the problems. NAFTA and the other free trade agreements just helped the problems get worse by sending jobs overseas to places that have cheap labor and no labor laws.

We now have a situation where more people in the family need to work in order to maintain the same standard of living, yet there are fewer jobs available than before.

The only kind of plan which will fix our economy is one that results in raising the wages of the average American worker by a significant amount. No other solution will help.