It's not "cool" to not know what one is talking about...

320 Years of History

320 Years of History

Gold Member
Nov 1, 2015
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Washington, D.C.
I just read a thread in which another member wrote the following:

Mac1958 said:
I don't visit this site to educate people on the basics.
Click to expand...
In another thread, I found myself having to write the following:
320 Years of History said:
[The question the member asked in a thread broadly themed on climate change] was "Parts of CO2 per million of what?" The OP is about CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. That makes the "what" be air, thus X parts of C02 per million liters of air.
Click to expand...
That wasn't my first answer to the member's inquiry. I thought initially s/he was unclear about the "ppm" abbreviation's meaning and context. I was wrong. That the ppm of CO2 was with regard to that compound's existence in air -- as opposed, perhaps, to rocks, water, dirt, etc. -- was the source of the member's uncertainty. Well, what can I say? I'm happy s/he got the information needed; that was the point of my bothering to answer the question.

I have to admit that it is variously frustrating and boring to find oneself in a political forum aiming to have a substantive discussion about XYZ topic that captures one's interest, only to find that some of the folks who are most willing to participate in the discussion routinely make remarks that show they need to be educated on the topic before either of you can get to having a meaningful debate/discussion. I'm not referring to learning what opinions are held by this or that proponent/opponent of a given policy; I mean just knowing the basic facts that have been long established and proven.

I'm not alone in not knowing about certain topics. One member seems to be quite "into" high finance topics. I don't generally have anything to say in those threads because I'm not all that interested in sophisticated financial investing topics; thus I don't know that much about it. And being uninterested in it, I don't intend to go find out about them in order to have a coherent/substantive discussion about them and their impacts. For other topics I didn't know much about them, but I care about them enough to research them. And yet other topics required little more than finding readily accessible credible/scholarly (not editorial) papers to include in my posts merely because I know that nobody here knows anything about me or what know "inside out" and what don't; thus I can't legitimately just say "XYZ is so" and expect to be taken seriously solely because "I" said so. (I can do that in my professional life, but my audience knows me. Y'all don't....that's got a lot to do with why many of my posts are long.)


At some point of late, I have come realize that in so much political discourse, understanding "the basics" is what so many lay writers and actual or would-be politicians either don't understand or ignore/disbelieve them even though they do understand them. Foremost among the subjects that I've noticed that happening is economics. For example:
  • Trade: Judging by the frequency with which we hear current politicians grousing about how free trade has been detrimental to the American economy, and the extent of support for free trade, one must infer that most folks simply refuse to accept free trade does more good than harm to an economy.

    Let's look at the basics of free trade.



    P = price; Q = quantity; S = supply; D = demand; T = tariff
    (For you math whizzes, yes, economists see quantity supplied as a function of price, even though economists present their graphs "backwards.")

    • The removal of tariffs leads to lower prices for consumers (Prices fall from P1 to P2)
    • This fall in prices enables an increase in consumer surplus of areas 1 + 2 + 3 + 4



    • Imports will increase from Q3-Q2 to Q4-Q1
    • The government will lose tax revenue of area 3. Tax revenue from imports was T (P1-P2) × (Q3-Q2)
    • Domestic firms producing this good will sell less and lose producer surplus equal to area 1
    • However overall there will be an increase in economic welfare of (2+4) (calculated as (1+2+3+4) – (1+3))
    • The magnitude of this increase depends upon the elasticity of supply and demand. If demand elastic consumers will have a big increase in welfare
    • Essentially, removing tariffs leads to lower prices for consumers – so the price of imported food, clothes and computers will be cheaper.

Free trade has become the scapegoat for politicians and voters. Free trade, they say, is the reason so many folks are unemployed or not employed as they would like to be (mis-/under employed). It's no wonder that it is. It's easy to point the finger at free trade because most folks aren't aware of the empirical underpinnings of how free trade actually works. Additionally and with beguiling intuitiveness, if producer moves its factory to another nation because wages are lower there, the person who lost their job thinks free trade is the cause.

Now one can take the basic principles above and test them by collecting data directly from the marketplace and measuring what impact(s) in fact a given free trade agreement has had on labor supply/suppliers. That, in fact, has been done. (Note, what follows is a listing of studies that examine and report what is, not what folks think about what is being what it is. In other words, it is not a listing of editorials/opinions.)
Additionally, one can consider the theorem of free trade to see how the math that supports the "big picture" basics given above actually works. Of course, doing that requires even more knowledge about econ and math, but frankly, one wants to be an economist student/professional one doesn't need to go that far because the matter of free trade and its benefits have been and are long and well understood. That they are so well understood is why they can be taught as they are using the graph above to undergraduates and high school students. That free trade produces more net gains than does un-free trade is a settled matter.

Sure a God made little green apples, I understand why individuals en masse grouse about free trade. As individuals, they see only that the labor they each have to supply is no longer in demand in the place where they are of a mind to supply it. That sucks if one is among those individuals. The thing is that free trade, indeed macroeconomics in general, doesn't care about John Brown or Margaret Green; it cares about and speaks to the state of an economy as a whole. Does that mean John and Margaret may get the short end of the stick? Yes, if they don't behave in a economically rational way, they most certainly may. The other thing is that elected leaders cannot reasonably be expected to manage the economy to John and Margaret's benefit; they must do so with regard to the economy on the whole.

Looking at some of the basics of free trade depicted above:
  • Do you see anything indicating free trade's goal or direct impacts have anything to do with labor? If you answered, "Yes. Free trade lowers the price of labor supplied/purchased in the market under consideration," you'd be correct.
  • Now ask yourself this.
    • Is a producer more or less likely to stay in business with higher or lower production costs?
    • Regardless of what one earns, will consumers find it easier or harder to purchase goods/services when prices are lower than they otherwise would be?
  • Now consider this:
    • Given the critical importance of comparative advantage in determining the gains from (free) trade, why is it that one rarely hears free trade's detractors make even a fleeting effort to identify what are America's comparative advantages?

      The answer is simple, but providing it dismays politicians who know damn well that the majority of their electorate don't have the first idea of what comparative advantage is. All most of those folks know is that they don't have the job they used to have or want to have. Pols usually know too that the truthful answer isn't all that comforting to "John" and "Margaret."

So where does that leave John and Margaret? Well, if they are willing to behave in an economically rational way, they have a few choices:
  • Supply a different kind of labor where they are.
  • Go to where the kind of labor they supply is in demand.
  • Go into business for themselves, thus becoming buyers and sellers of labor rather than solely sellers (producers) of it.
  • Do none of those things and suffer the consequences.
They have those choices because that's how it works in America. With freedom comes responsibility, and part of that responsibility is making rational economic choices for oneself. Were John and Margaret citizens in a nation with a command economy, they would be told on which of those choices they will act, but as Americans, they aren't going to be told. As Americans, they will have information made available to them about economics, the players in the economic game, policies that the government has or will implement, and so on. Using that information in a rational manner, John and Margaret are entrusted to, I suppose some would say "required to" or "burdened with," make(ing) rational choices about which of those courses of action they will take.

I'm no different than John and Margaret. I was part of the flood of business transformation projects that happened in the U.S. in the 1990s. U.S. companies were on the forefront of that process; thus I knew there would come a day when the U.S. companies that buy my (my competitors' similar) services will nearly all have completed their evolution to 21st century models. That is part and parcel why I began in the mid-1990s to build my skills and contacts for doing so outside the U.S. when the U.S. market for my services/skills dried up/contracted.

For today's up and coming workers, it should be blatantly apparent that globalization is here to stay. What does that mean? Well, I can't predict all the things it means for any specific individual, but one thing I can say is that the places in the world that haven't matured as has the U.S and Western Europe have are the places where the most rapid growth will occur. That's just how business/economic cycles work as they move from nascence to maturity, and each of us must apply that concept to our own situation.

If one is an American and wants to be part of that growth and reap some of the rewards, speaking one of the languages spoken where that growth will happen is going to be a big a plus, if not a necessity. I got started working internationally that I didn't have to speak anything other than English. My kids, however, will have to fluently speak something in addition to English, be it Spanish, Hindi or Mandarin/Cantonese or some other language, perhaps Arabic.


Sidebar:
FWIW, my kids went with Spanish as their main "other" language because there are more Spanish speaking democracies than there are Chinese or Arabic speaking ones, but they also speak and write passable, if not fluent, Mandarin...just in case fortune finds them from that direction...if it does, they are prepared to take advantage of the opportunity if/when it arrives. That's not luck happening; it's making one's own "luck." It's preparing to be able to reach out and and grab hold of an opportunity that comes one's way, even when it doesn't fall directly into one's lap.

You see, anyone can do this:

Baseball_Adult-Player-Catching-Fly-Ball-Two-Hands_01_300x350.jpg

If that's the limit of what a team's players can and will do, that team isn't going to the World Series.

The more prepared ones are prepared to and will do this -- which takes a far wider array of adroitness, will, verve and ability than does standing there and catching a ball that is headed right into one's uplifted glove -- if that's what it takes to achieve success:

Valley_V.jpg


ap_baseball_hall_of_fame_78668120.jpg


maxresdefault.jpg

It's not always solely about what one can or wants to do. It's about being prepared, given the "rules of the game," to do what one must to make it happen. Success -- economic, political, athletic, academic, etc. -- more often results from what one exerts oneself to the fullest extent to make happen than it does from waiting for someone else to make it happen for oneself. But, hey, one is free to wait on that "knight in shining armor" if one wants. For those folks, I hope he shows up. Far be it from me to insist one do otherwise.
​
End of sidebar.
​

The aforementioned illustrations aside, let's return more directly to why I wrote what's above and cited the other member's and my own remarks at the start of this post (Note: it's not to discuss whether anyone aims to educate folks here)....

Researchers, in a report prepared for the National Council on Economic Education, state that 34% of respondents scored an "A" or "B" on an economics quiz that at best represents the tip of the iceberg of what constitutes "the basics" of economics.
All the more surprising is that 50% of the respondents indicated they had studied economics. That is surprising because the nature of the questions is exceedingly simple; one would expect, given the simplicity of the questions and having studied econ, at least 50% of the adults in the survey to have scored an "A" or "B" on the quiz. In fact, most of the quiz questions ask about the handful of things that are accurately intuited about economic principles. In my and others' opinion, a lot about economics isn't intuitive at all; one has to actually study and think pretty carefully about most econ principles and concepts. (If you were a "curve buster" in an econ class, or endured the outcome of there being a two or three of them in your econ class, you know what I'm talking about.) The impact of free trade vs. constrained trade is one such thing. (If you click on the preceding link, you'll find a discussion of the theory (science sense of the word) of comparative advantage along with a very good depiction intended for skeptics of free trade's net benefits over restricted trade.)

That study linked above is just one that discusses the insufficiency manifest among Americans in general when it comes to economic topics. Given their dearth of basic economic awareness, just how do folks justifiably ascribe to ideas such as "the middle class have been defrauded by the elite?" (Power elite, intellectual elite, monied elite, insiders, etc.) By what means do they know? Because someone who is among one of the "elite" says so in an effort to garner the "non elite's" support?

The fact is that nobody has misled the American people. What has happened is that people have allowed themselves to believe for topics that it's all "really quite simple." Well, making sense of those topics and how to manage one's affairs re: them is pretty simple if one understands them, but clearly, for many topics, most particularly economics and science, most folks don't. Even worse, they don't bother to get well informed (even at a basic level) on the topic. And the terrible thing about that is that it's just not that hard to do for a wide variety of subject. The factual and objective information is there for the taking.
The selected resources above are better places to go to find out the real "411" on whatever topic one might come across on CNN, Fox, or whatever other "pop" news source. For better or worse, commercial news and information outlets are useful for learning that a given topic is "hot" at the moment, but not all or often that good for obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the full scope of a matter, which, for most stuff these days, unlike 100 years ago, is what one needs in order to have rightfully have and reliably act upon one's opinion about it.
 
You over think. The sun heats up, the sun cools down. We warm and cool as a result.
Global warming was too specific, and scientifically deniable. What they are calling it now is climate change. How many can argue that climates change? Free yourself from the belief that all of that money that we are pouring into the world bank has anything to do with the environment. It is actually a money redistribution scam of the UN's. Our money to whomever wants some. It has to stop.
 
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No amount of obfuscation can mask the deleterious effects free trade has had on our society. Free trade has cost this country jobs, I have yet to read an assessment that claimed otherwise.
 
Tehon said:
No amount of obfuscation can mask the deleterious effects free trade has had on our society. Free trade has cost this country jobs, I have yet to read an assessment that claimed otherwise.
Click to expand...

Red:
I cannot accurately attest to why you have yet to read what you have not read. I can say it's certainly not because rigorously conducted research doesn't exist to refute the intuitive-but-mistaken view that free trade causes net employment losses within a system characterized by free trade such as the system of exchange between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

It might be for any number of reasons, one of which may be that you haven't read the documents to which I linked or others.
  • The Fruits of Free Trade
  • April 2015: The North American Free Trade Agreement (Congressional Research Service)
    • "NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters."
  • January 2016: NAFTA's Economic Impact (Council on Foreign Relations)
    • "Some fourteen million jobs rely on trade with Canada and Mexico, while the nearly two hundred thousand export-related jobs created annually by the pact pay 15 to 20 percent more on average than the jobs that were lost."
    • "Some jobs are lost due to imports, but others are created, and consumers benefit significantly from the falling prices and often improved quality of goods created by import competition. A 2014 PIIE study of NAFTA's effects found that about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to the pact—but that for each of those jobs lost, the economy gains roughly $450,000 in the form of higher productivity and lower consumer prices."
    • "The steepest decline in manufacturing jobs, which fell from seventeen million to eleven million between 2000 and 2010, is mostly attributable to trade with China and underlying technological changes."
    • "By contributing to the development of cross-border supply chains, NAFTA lowered costs, increased productivity, and improved U.S. competitiveness. This meant shedding some jobs in the United States as positions moved to Mexico, he argues, but without the pact, even more would have otherwise been lost."
  • May 2014: NAFTA at 20 (Peterson Institute for International Economics)
  • March 2004: NAFTA and its Impact on the United States
    • "The last positive impact has been a slight increase in United States jobs in the agricultural industry....NAFTA has enabled United States agricultural producers and consumers to more effectively use their comparative advantages and to respond more efficiently to changing economic conditions. Although the free trade agreement has caused some negative impacts, the positive impacts seem to outweigh them. This is especially true for the agricultural industry in the United States, in which agricultural growth has been phenomenal."
  • Winter 2001: The Impact of NAFTA on the United States
    • "The broad consensus from research in the early 1990s suggested that these fears [of job loss] were overstated. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (1993) estimated that the total number of U.S. workers who might have to change their jobs due to NAFTA was likely to be substantially less than half a million, spread out over at least a decade. To put this number in perspective, the CBO noted that in the 1980s, nearly 20 million workers lost their jobs and were not recalled by their former employers. Similarly, a Department of Labor (1992) survey of potential employment effects of NAFTA found that sectoral employment changes would be small, in most cases less than 2 percent of current sectoral employment and much less than normal turnover rates."
    • "Congress and the Clinton administration, concerned that even employment effects which were small in the aggregate appeared likely to be concentrated by industry and region, enacted NAFTA-TAA as part of the NAFTA implementing legislation. NAFTA-TAA expands the trade adjustment benefits, which were originally established in the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, by providing job training as well as additional income support for workers displaced by imports from Mexico and Canada."
    • "As of July 1999, the U.S. Department of Labor had certified 238,051 workers for NAFTA-TAA, an average of 3662 workers per month. While these numbers probably understate the displacement due to NAFTA because some qualified workers did not apply, they are still quite low in the context of U.S. labor markets."
    • "Many post-NAFTA studies describe the effects of increased U.S. imports on jobs. ... They find that the job impact is relatively small, with the total estimated potential job impact in the United States from 1990-97 due to imports from Mexico at 299,000, or an average of 37,000 jobs lost per year due to increased Mexican trade. To put this number in perspective, they note that the U.S. economy has been creating over 200,000 jobs per month."
    • "The International Trade Commission [analyzed] 120 manufacturing sectors. It found seven sectors in which imports from NAFTA countries had an adverse effect on employment, four sectors where imports had a positive effect on employment, and in all other sectors imports had no effect on employment."
    • "The U.S. Department of Agriculture (1997) used a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to assess the effects of NAFTA on rural employment. They calculate the changes in employment with and without NAFTA, finding that U.S. rural employment in 1996 is 0.07 percent higher with NAFTA than it would be without the agreement, with the greatest increases in non-grain crops."
    • "Most fears about the ill effects of NAFTA on the U.S. auto industry, whether in term of employment, wages, or investment, have been proven wrong. The U.S. auto industry did experience rationalization of production and hence job displacements. But overall, NAFTA appears to have helped the U.S. auto sector (U.S. Trade Representative, 1997). Employment in the American automotive industry grew by 14.1 percent overall, with an increase of 16.1 percent in the auto parts sector and 10.1 percent in the motor vehicle assembly sector from 1994-1996. Hourly earnings for production workers in the U.S. automotive sector grew by 5.6 percent between 1993 and 1996. The Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers invested $39.1 billion from 1993 to 1996 in new manufacturing plants and equipment in the United States, while investing only $3 billion in Mexico over the same period."
    • "We find a dramatic increase in intra-industry trade in autos and parts. In 1993, for example, intra-industry trade in autos represented 52 percent of all North American trade in autos; by 1999, it was 79 percent. As the U.S. Trade Representative (1997) notes, U.S. imports of vehicles assembled in Mexico include a high percentage of auto parts made in the United States. There appear to be efficiency gains from finer specialization within the industry. These gains do not appear to be “Ricardian,” in that they are not primarily based on different national factor proportions, but “Smithian” in the sense that NAFTA widened the extent of the market and permitted increasing returns to finer specialization."
    • "Since the passage of NAFTA, U.S. textile production has increased, although textile and apparel employment both continue to decline. Technological change has been the main factor causing job loss, while also accounting for higher wages among remaining workers. NAFTA, with its strong rules of origin, actually preserved U.S. jobs in the textile and apparel industries, contrary to pre-NAFTA fears that jobs would be lost to Mexico."
    • "NAFTA, with its strong rules of origin, actually preserved U.S. jobs in the textile and apparel industries, contrary to pre-NAFTA fears that jobs would be lost to Mexico. According to the U.S. Trade Representative (1997), two-thirds of the value of U.S. textiles and apparel imported from Mexico in 1996 was comprised of originally U.S. content. In contrast, Asian textile and apparel products have almost no U.S. content."
It may also or instead be because you've only read from partisan sources rather than impartial and rigorously considered sources of information.
  • The Politics and Economics of Offshore Outsourcing
    Outsourcing appears to be connected to increased U.S. employment and investment rather than to overall job loss. Some U.S. jobs are certainly lost to other countries. On the whole, however, firms involved with offshore outsourcing are not shifting net jobs overseas but instead are creating jobs both in the United States and in other countries.
It could also be because you haven't looked for credible and rigorously developed research and information that counters the mantra that free trade has a net negative impact on employment. It could even be that you have a "TL;WR" attitude about the documents that show the rigorously researched facts that show free trade does not have a net negative impact on employment.


Though I am a strong advocate of drinking from the well of rigorous research for that's where one finds content that clearly explains the methodology, shows the math that supports the analysis, and so on, there also exist non-scholarly reports and discussion that

Looking at the Job Loss Matter:
How much of these job losses can be attributed to the impact of NAFTA? Wharton management professor Mauro Guillen has a very different view, suggesting that without NAFTA, many jobs that were lost over this period would probably have gone to China or elsewhere. “Perhaps NAFTA accelerated the process, but it did not make a huge difference. At the same time, a lot of jobs were created in the U.S. that wouldn’t be there without the Mexico trade. I’m not just talking about Texas or California or Arizona…. Many of the products made in Mexico are designed in the United States. So there are a lot of jobs created here.”

Walter Kemmsies, chief economist at Moffatt Nichol, an international infrastructure consultancy, notes that close to 40% of what the U.S. imports from Mexico is derived from U.S. sources. “This is the symbol of the success of NAFTA.” Twenty years ago, he estimates, that percentage was less than 5%.

Overall, has NAFTA been a good thing? Morris Cohen, Wharton professor of operations and information management, states that for many years, “economists have been arguing about whether global trade is a net benefit or net cost; who are the winners and who are the losers. There has been lots of ink spilled on that issue. The consensus from my perspective is that trade is generally a good thing; it helps to elevate the standard of living and it raises the level of economic activity on both sides. But there’s a net transfer sometimes, and definitely the notion of winners and losers. We don’t have the luxury of being able to have done the experiment [to find out] what would have happened had there been no NAFTA.” Or, he adds, to figure out to what extent the conditions that exist today are a result of NAFTA, or not the result.
​

So, while, yes, free trade, and NAFTA in particular, can and does cost some jobs. Does it, or at least the NAFTA free trade agreement -- Lord only knows why folks rail so loudly against NAFTA; it's not our only free trade agreement -- result in job losses that justify all the rancor and rhetoric we hear these days? Not even close, although, I'm sure the relatively few folks (amongst the 250M+ American workforce) who've lost their jobs due to NAFTA won't see it that way. The thing is that neither will folks like you who fail to critically/objectively question and answer whether NAFTA or something else might in fact be the cause of the lost jobs.
 
320 Years of History said:
Tehon said:
No amount of obfuscation can mask the deleterious effects free trade has had on our society. Free trade has cost this country jobs, I have yet to read an assessment that claimed otherwise.
Click to expand...

Red:
I cannot accurately attest to why you have yet to read what you have not read. I can say it's certainly not because rigorously conducted research doesn't exist to refute the intuitive-but-mistaken view that free trade causes net employment losses within a system characterized by free trade such as the system of exchange between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

It might be for any number of reasons, one of which may be that you haven't read the documents to which I linked or others.
  • The Fruits of Free Trade
  • April 2015: The North American Free Trade Agreement (Congressional Research Service)
    • "NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters."
  • January 2016: NAFTA's Economic Impact (Council on Foreign Relations)
    • "Some fourteen million jobs rely on trade with Canada and Mexico, while the nearly two hundred thousand export-related jobs created annually by the pact pay 15 to 20 percent more on average than the jobs that were lost."
    • "Some jobs are lost due to imports, but others are created, and consumers benefit significantly from the falling prices and often improved quality of goods created by import competition. A 2014 PIIE study of NAFTA's effects found that about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to the pact—but that for each of those jobs lost, the economy gains roughly $450,000 in the form of higher productivity and lower consumer prices."
    • "The steepest decline in manufacturing jobs, which fell from seventeen million to eleven million between 2000 and 2010, is mostly attributable to trade with China and underlying technological changes."
    • "By contributing to the development of cross-border supply chains, NAFTA lowered costs, increased productivity, and improved U.S. competitiveness. This meant shedding some jobs in the United States as positions moved to Mexico, he argues, but without the pact, even more would have otherwise been lost."
  • May 2014: NAFTA at 20 (Peterson Institute for International Economics)
  • March 2004: NAFTA and its Impact on the United States
    • "The last positive impact has been a slight increase in United States jobs in the agricultural industry....NAFTA has enabled United States agricultural producers and consumers to more effectively use their comparative advantages and to respond more efficiently to changing economic conditions. Although the free trade agreement has caused some negative impacts, the positive impacts seem to outweigh them. This is especially true for the agricultural industry in the United States, in which agricultural growth has been phenomenal."
  • Winter 2001: The Impact of NAFTA on the United States
    • "The broad consensus from research in the early 1990s suggested that these fears [of job loss] were overstated. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (1993) estimated that the total number of U.S. workers who might have to change their jobs due to NAFTA was likely to be substantially less than half a million, spread out over at least a decade. To put this number in perspective, the CBO noted that in the 1980s, nearly 20 million workers lost their jobs and were not recalled by their former employers. Similarly, a Department of Labor (1992) survey of potential employment effects of NAFTA found that sectoral employment changes would be small, in most cases less than 2 percent of current sectoral employment and much less than normal turnover rates."
    • "Congress and the Clinton administration, concerned that even employment effects which were small in the aggregate appeared likely to be concentrated by industry and region, enacted NAFTA-TAA as part of the NAFTA implementing legislation. NAFTA-TAA expands the trade adjustment benefits, which were originally established in the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, by providing job training as well as additional income support for workers displaced by imports from Mexico and Canada."
    • "As of July 1999, the U.S. Department of Labor had certified 238,051 workers for NAFTA-TAA, an average of 3662 workers per month. While these numbers probably understate the displacement due to NAFTA because some qualified workers did not apply, they are still quite low in the context of U.S. labor markets."
    • "Many post-NAFTA studies describe the effects of increased U.S. imports on jobs. ... They find that the job impact is relatively small, with the total estimated potential job impact in the United States from 1990-97 due to imports from Mexico at 299,000, or an average of 37,000 jobs lost per year due to increased Mexican trade. To put this number in perspective, they note that the U.S. economy has been creating over 200,000 jobs per month."
    • "The International Trade Commission [analyzed] 120 manufacturing sectors. It found seven sectors in which imports from NAFTA countries had an adverse effect on employment, four sectors where imports had a positive effect on employment, and in all other sectors imports had no effect on employment."
    • "The U.S. Department of Agriculture (1997) used a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to assess the effects of NAFTA on rural employment. They calculate the changes in employment with and without NAFTA, finding that U.S. rural employment in 1996 is 0.07 percent higher with NAFTA than it would be without the agreement, with the greatest increases in non-grain crops."
    • "Most fears about the ill effects of NAFTA on the U.S. auto industry, whether in term of employment, wages, or investment, have been proven wrong. The U.S. auto industry did experience rationalization of production and hence job displacements. But overall, NAFTA appears to have helped the U.S. auto sector (U.S. Trade Representative, 1997). Employment in the American automotive industry grew by 14.1 percent overall, with an increase of 16.1 percent in the auto parts sector and 10.1 percent in the motor vehicle assembly sector from 1994-1996. Hourly earnings for production workers in the U.S. automotive sector grew by 5.6 percent between 1993 and 1996. The Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers invested $39.1 billion from 1993 to 1996 in new manufacturing plants and equipment in the United States, while investing only $3 billion in Mexico over the same period."
    • "We find a dramatic increase in intra-industry trade in autos and parts. In 1993, for example, intra-industry trade in autos represented 52 percent of all North American trade in autos; by 1999, it was 79 percent. As the U.S. Trade Representative (1997) notes, U.S. imports of vehicles assembled in Mexico include a high percentage of auto parts made in the United States. There appear to be efficiency gains from finer specialization within the industry. These gains do not appear to be “Ricardian,” in that they are not primarily based on different national factor proportions, but “Smithian” in the sense that NAFTA widened the extent of the market and permitted increasing returns to finer specialization."
    • "Since the passage of NAFTA, U.S. textile production has increased, although textile and apparel employment both continue to decline. Technological change has been the main factor causing job loss, while also accounting for higher wages among remaining workers. NAFTA, with its strong rules of origin, actually preserved U.S. jobs in the textile and apparel industries, contrary to pre-NAFTA fears that jobs would be lost to Mexico."
    • "NAFTA, with its strong rules of origin, actually preserved U.S. jobs in the textile and apparel industries, contrary to pre-NAFTA fears that jobs would be lost to Mexico. According to the U.S. Trade Representative (1997), two-thirds of the value of U.S. textiles and apparel imported from Mexico in 1996 was comprised of originally U.S. content. In contrast, Asian textile and apparel products have almost no U.S. content."
It may also or instead be because you've only read from partisan sources rather than impartial and rigorously considered sources of information.
  • The Politics and Economics of Offshore Outsourcing
    Outsourcing appears to be connected to increased U.S. employment and investment rather than to overall job loss. Some U.S. jobs are certainly lost to other countries. On the whole, however, firms involved with offshore outsourcing are not shifting net jobs overseas but instead are creating jobs both in the United States and in other countries.
It could also be because you haven't looked for credible and rigorously developed research and information that counters the mantra that free trade has a net negative impact on employment. It could even be that you have a "TL;WR" attitude about the documents that show the rigorously researched facts that show free trade does not have a net negative impact on employment.


Though I am a strong advocate of drinking from the well of rigorous research for that's where one finds content that clearly explains the methodology, shows the math that supports the analysis, and so on, there also exist non-scholarly reports and discussion that

Looking at the Job Loss Matter:
How much of these job losses can be attributed to the impact of NAFTA? Wharton management professor Mauro Guillen has a very different view, suggesting that without NAFTA, many jobs that were lost over this period would probably have gone to China or elsewhere. “Perhaps NAFTA accelerated the process, but it did not make a huge difference. At the same time, a lot of jobs were created in the U.S. that wouldn’t be there without the Mexico trade. I’m not just talking about Texas or California or Arizona…. Many of the products made in Mexico are designed in the United States. So there are a lot of jobs created here.”

Walter Kemmsies, chief economist at Moffatt Nichol, an international infrastructure consultancy, notes that close to 40% of what the U.S. imports from Mexico is derived from U.S. sources. “This is the symbol of the success of NAFTA.” Twenty years ago, he estimates, that percentage was less than 5%.

Overall, has NAFTA been a good thing? Morris Cohen, Wharton professor of operations and information management, states that for many years, “economists have been arguing about whether global trade is a net benefit or net cost; who are the winners and who are the losers. There has been lots of ink spilled on that issue. The consensus from my perspective is that trade is generally a good thing; it helps to elevate the standard of living and it raises the level of economic activity on both sides. But there’s a net transfer sometimes, and definitely the notion of winners and losers. We don’t have the luxury of being able to have done the experiment [to find out] what would have happened had there been no NAFTA.” Or, he adds, to figure out to what extent the conditions that exist today are a result of NAFTA, or not the result.
​

So, while, yes, free trade, and NAFTA in particular, can and does cost some jobs. Does it, or at least the NAFTA free trade agreement -- Lord only knows why folks rail so loudly against NAFTA; it's not our only free trade agreement -- result in job losses that justify all the rancor and rhetoric we hear these days? Not even close, although, I'm sure the relatively few folks (amongst the 250M+ American workforce) who've lost their jobs due to NAFTA won't see it that way. The thing is that neither will folks like you who fail to critically/objectively question and answer whether NAFTA or something else might in fact be the cause of the lost jobs.
Click to expand...
I cannot accurately attest to why you have yet to read what you have not read.........
It might be for any number of reasons, one of which may be that you haven't read the documents to which I linked or others.

I did look through the documents which you linked, there is nothing there that refutes my statement. Quite the opposite actually.
A 2014 PIIE study of NAFTA's effects found that about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to the pact
Click to expand...
 
The Irish Ram said:
You over think. The sun heats up, the sun cools down. We warm and cool as a result.
Global warming was too specific, and scientifically deniable. What they are calling it now is climate change. How many can argue that climates change? Free yourself from the belief that all of that money that we are pouring into the world bank has anything to do with the environment. It is actually a money redistribution scam of the UN's. Our money to whomever wants some. It has to stop.
Click to expand...

Exhibit A of OP's point /\/\/\/\
 
GaryDog said:
The Irish Ram said:
You over think. The sun heats up, the sun cools down. We warm and cool as a result.
Global warming was too specific, and scientifically deniable. What they are calling it now is climate change. How many can argue that climates change? Free yourself from the belief that all of that money that we are pouring into the world bank has anything to do with the environment. It is actually a money redistribution scam of the UN's. Our money to whomever wants some. It has to stop.
Click to expand...

Exhibit A of OP's point /\/\/\/\
Click to expand...

If the people who are giddy about being able to redistribute our money tell you, out of their own mouths, that this money grab has nothing to with the environment, tells you to free yourself from that line of thinking, and re-iterates that it is a redistribution of wealth plan,and you still don't get it, then you are too brainwashed to try to get through to. For the last time:

IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”
De facto means actually, or in reality. You need a dose of reality. Global warming is an illusion, like magicians use, to trick the eye and mind.

Here's the real reason for your climate change:
In Their Own Words: Climate Alarmists Debunk Their 'Science'
 
Last edited:
Tehon said:
320 Years of History said:
Tehon said:
No amount of obfuscation can mask the deleterious effects free trade has had on our society. Free trade has cost this country jobs, I have yet to read an assessment that claimed otherwise.
Click to expand...

Red:
I cannot accurately attest to why you have yet to read what you have not read. I can say it's certainly not because rigorously conducted research doesn't exist to refute the intuitive-but-mistaken view that free trade causes net employment losses within a system characterized by free trade such as the system of exchange between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

It might be for any number of reasons, one of which may be that you haven't read the documents to which I linked or others.
  • The Fruits of Free Trade
  • April 2015: The North American Free Trade Agreement (Congressional Research Service)
    • "NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters."
  • January 2016: NAFTA's Economic Impact (Council on Foreign Relations)
    • "Some fourteen million jobs rely on trade with Canada and Mexico, while the nearly two hundred thousand export-related jobs created annually by the pact pay 15 to 20 percent more on average than the jobs that were lost."
    • "Some jobs are lost due to imports, but others are created, and consumers benefit significantly from the falling prices and often improved quality of goods created by import competition. A 2014 PIIE study of NAFTA's effects found that about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to the pact—but that for each of those jobs lost, the economy gains roughly $450,000 in the form of higher productivity and lower consumer prices."
    • "The steepest decline in manufacturing jobs, which fell from seventeen million to eleven million between 2000 and 2010, is mostly attributable to trade with China and underlying technological changes."
    • "By contributing to the development of cross-border supply chains, NAFTA lowered costs, increased productivity, and improved U.S. competitiveness. This meant shedding some jobs in the United States as positions moved to Mexico, he argues, but without the pact, even more would have otherwise been lost."
  • May 2014: NAFTA at 20 (Peterson Institute for International Economics)
  • March 2004: NAFTA and its Impact on the United States
    • "The last positive impact has been a slight increase in United States jobs in the agricultural industry....NAFTA has enabled United States agricultural producers and consumers to more effectively use their comparative advantages and to respond more efficiently to changing economic conditions. Although the free trade agreement has caused some negative impacts, the positive impacts seem to outweigh them. This is especially true for the agricultural industry in the United States, in which agricultural growth has been phenomenal."
  • Winter 2001: The Impact of NAFTA on the United States
    • "The broad consensus from research in the early 1990s suggested that these fears [of job loss] were overstated. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (1993) estimated that the total number of U.S. workers who might have to change their jobs due to NAFTA was likely to be substantially less than half a million, spread out over at least a decade. To put this number in perspective, the CBO noted that in the 1980s, nearly 20 million workers lost their jobs and were not recalled by their former employers. Similarly, a Department of Labor (1992) survey of potential employment effects of NAFTA found that sectoral employment changes would be small, in most cases less than 2 percent of current sectoral employment and much less than normal turnover rates."
    • "Congress and the Clinton administration, concerned that even employment effects which were small in the aggregate appeared likely to be concentrated by industry and region, enacted NAFTA-TAA as part of the NAFTA implementing legislation. NAFTA-TAA expands the trade adjustment benefits, which were originally established in the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, by providing job training as well as additional income support for workers displaced by imports from Mexico and Canada."
    • "As of July 1999, the U.S. Department of Labor had certified 238,051 workers for NAFTA-TAA, an average of 3662 workers per month. While these numbers probably understate the displacement due to NAFTA because some qualified workers did not apply, they are still quite low in the context of U.S. labor markets."
    • "Many post-NAFTA studies describe the effects of increased U.S. imports on jobs. ... They find that the job impact is relatively small, with the total estimated potential job impact in the United States from 1990-97 due to imports from Mexico at 299,000, or an average of 37,000 jobs lost per year due to increased Mexican trade. To put this number in perspective, they note that the U.S. economy has been creating over 200,000 jobs per month."
    • "The International Trade Commission [analyzed] 120 manufacturing sectors. It found seven sectors in which imports from NAFTA countries had an adverse effect on employment, four sectors where imports had a positive effect on employment, and in all other sectors imports had no effect on employment."
    • "The U.S. Department of Agriculture (1997) used a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to assess the effects of NAFTA on rural employment. They calculate the changes in employment with and without NAFTA, finding that U.S. rural employment in 1996 is 0.07 percent higher with NAFTA than it would be without the agreement, with the greatest increases in non-grain crops."
    • "Most fears about the ill effects of NAFTA on the U.S. auto industry, whether in term of employment, wages, or investment, have been proven wrong. The U.S. auto industry did experience rationalization of production and hence job displacements. But overall, NAFTA appears to have helped the U.S. auto sector (U.S. Trade Representative, 1997). Employment in the American automotive industry grew by 14.1 percent overall, with an increase of 16.1 percent in the auto parts sector and 10.1 percent in the motor vehicle assembly sector from 1994-1996. Hourly earnings for production workers in the U.S. automotive sector grew by 5.6 percent between 1993 and 1996. The Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers invested $39.1 billion from 1993 to 1996 in new manufacturing plants and equipment in the United States, while investing only $3 billion in Mexico over the same period."
    • "We find a dramatic increase in intra-industry trade in autos and parts. In 1993, for example, intra-industry trade in autos represented 52 percent of all North American trade in autos; by 1999, it was 79 percent. As the U.S. Trade Representative (1997) notes, U.S. imports of vehicles assembled in Mexico include a high percentage of auto parts made in the United States. There appear to be efficiency gains from finer specialization within the industry. These gains do not appear to be “Ricardian,” in that they are not primarily based on different national factor proportions, but “Smithian” in the sense that NAFTA widened the extent of the market and permitted increasing returns to finer specialization."
    • "Since the passage of NAFTA, U.S. textile production has increased, although textile and apparel employment both continue to decline. Technological change has been the main factor causing job loss, while also accounting for higher wages among remaining workers. NAFTA, with its strong rules of origin, actually preserved U.S. jobs in the textile and apparel industries, contrary to pre-NAFTA fears that jobs would be lost to Mexico."
    • "NAFTA, with its strong rules of origin, actually preserved U.S. jobs in the textile and apparel industries, contrary to pre-NAFTA fears that jobs would be lost to Mexico. According to the U.S. Trade Representative (1997), two-thirds of the value of U.S. textiles and apparel imported from Mexico in 1996 was comprised of originally U.S. content. In contrast, Asian textile and apparel products have almost no U.S. content."
It may also or instead be because you've only read from partisan sources rather than impartial and rigorously considered sources of information.
  • The Politics and Economics of Offshore Outsourcing
    Outsourcing appears to be connected to increased U.S. employment and investment rather than to overall job loss. Some U.S. jobs are certainly lost to other countries. On the whole, however, firms involved with offshore outsourcing are not shifting net jobs overseas but instead are creating jobs both in the United States and in other countries.
It could also be because you haven't looked for credible and rigorously developed research and information that counters the mantra that free trade has a net negative impact on employment. It could even be that you have a "TL;WR" attitude about the documents that show the rigorously researched facts that show free trade does not have a net negative impact on employment.


Though I am a strong advocate of drinking from the well of rigorous research for that's where one finds content that clearly explains the methodology, shows the math that supports the analysis, and so on, there also exist non-scholarly reports and discussion that

Looking at the Job Loss Matter:
How much of these job losses can be attributed to the impact of NAFTA? Wharton management professor Mauro Guillen has a very different view, suggesting that without NAFTA, many jobs that were lost over this period would probably have gone to China or elsewhere. “Perhaps NAFTA accelerated the process, but it did not make a huge difference. At the same time, a lot of jobs were created in the U.S. that wouldn’t be there without the Mexico trade. I’m not just talking about Texas or California or Arizona…. Many of the products made in Mexico are designed in the United States. So there are a lot of jobs created here.”

Walter Kemmsies, chief economist at Moffatt Nichol, an international infrastructure consultancy, notes that close to 40% of what the U.S. imports from Mexico is derived from U.S. sources. “This is the symbol of the success of NAFTA.” Twenty years ago, he estimates, that percentage was less than 5%.

Overall, has NAFTA been a good thing? Morris Cohen, Wharton professor of operations and information management, states that for many years, “economists have been arguing about whether global trade is a net benefit or net cost; who are the winners and who are the losers. There has been lots of ink spilled on that issue. The consensus from my perspective is that trade is generally a good thing; it helps to elevate the standard of living and it raises the level of economic activity on both sides. But there’s a net transfer sometimes, and definitely the notion of winners and losers. We don’t have the luxury of being able to have done the experiment [to find out] what would have happened had there been no NAFTA.” Or, he adds, to figure out to what extent the conditions that exist today are a result of NAFTA, or not the result.
​

So, while, yes, free trade, and NAFTA in particular, can and does cost some jobs. Does it, or at least the NAFTA free trade agreement -- Lord only knows why folks rail so loudly against NAFTA; it's not our only free trade agreement -- result in job losses that justify all the rancor and rhetoric we hear these days? Not even close, although, I'm sure the relatively few folks (amongst the 250M+ American workforce) who've lost their jobs due to NAFTA won't see it that way. The thing is that neither will folks like you who fail to critically/objectively question and answer whether NAFTA or something else might in fact be the cause of the lost jobs.
Click to expand...
I cannot accurately attest to why you have yet to read what you have not read.........
It might be for any number of reasons, one of which may be that you haven't read the documents to which I linked or others.

I did look through the documents which you linked, there is nothing there that refutes my statement. Quite the opposite actually.
A 2014 PIIE study of NAFTA's effects found that about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to the pact
Click to expand...
Click to expand...


Blue:
With that I bestow upon you the "Form over Substance" award.

Why?

320 Years of History said:
So, while, yes, free trade, and NAFTA in particular, can and does cost some jobs. Does it, or at least the NAFTA free trade agreement -- Lord only knows why folks rail so loudly against NAFTA; it's not our only free trade agreement -- result in job losses that justify all the rancor and rhetoric we hear these days? Not even close...
Click to expand...
 
The Irish Ram said:
GaryDog said:
The Irish Ram said:
You over think. The sun heats up, the sun cools down. We warm and cool as a result.
Global warming was too specific, and scientifically deniable. What they are calling it now is climate change. How many can argue that climates change? Free yourself from the belief that all of that money that we are pouring into the world bank has anything to do with the environment. It is actually a money redistribution scam of the UN's. Our money to whomever wants some. It has to stop.
Click to expand...

Exhibit A of OP's point /\/\/\/\
Click to expand...

If the people who are giddy about being able to redistribute our money tell you, out of their own mouths, that this money grab has nothing to with the environment, tells you to free yourself from that line of thinking, and re-iterates that it is a redistribution of wealth plan,and you still don't get it, then you are too brainwashed to try to get through to. For the last time:

IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”
De facto means actually, or in reality. You need a dose of reality. Global warming is an illusion, like magicians use, to trick the eye and mind.

Here's the real reason for your climate change:
In Their Own Words: Climate Alarmists Debunk Their 'Science'
Click to expand...

Exactly I don't want to talk about boring science stuff like C02 ppms, because we know during in the dino era it had 5 times more CO2 in the atmosphere, it has been suggested during the Roman era it has been much warmer, using science we know the deaths history always changed and has been known to change in a blink of an eye like the great Sahara changing tropical to dry fast in cosmic terms.

My specialty is politics news and currant events, my other specialty is temperature instruments been using them for over 30 years and I know how they evolved and how different people read and record them different

I want to talk motives behind the science I want to know facts

Just like gruber and obama manipulating obama care to the public to get it passed and once they succeeded to get it passed an the genie out of the bottle..
They just shrugged their shoulders and said "we bad" with a grin.

The Gruber Confession


.
 
The CBO, warned us, with their own mouths, that they couldn't tell us what Obama care was actually going to cost, because they got it with none of the financial blanks filled in. Fill in those blanks and the CBO said it could spell disaster. And it will.
And no, you can not keep your doctor. That was Obomb-bullshit, and he knew it before he said it. They rely on our stupidity. They said so. And it is working. We just let them turn our children into snowflakes. And we are going to reap what we have let them sow.
 
Last edited:
320 Years of History said:
Tehon said:
320 Years of History said:
Tehon said:
No amount of obfuscation can mask the deleterious effects free trade has had on our society. Free trade has cost this country jobs, I have yet to read an assessment that claimed otherwise.
Click to expand...

Red:
I cannot accurately attest to why you have yet to read what you have not read. I can say it's certainly not because rigorously conducted research doesn't exist to refute the intuitive-but-mistaken view that free trade causes net employment losses within a system characterized by free trade such as the system of exchange between the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

It might be for any number of reasons, one of which may be that you haven't read the documents to which I linked or others.
  • The Fruits of Free Trade
  • April 2015: The North American Free Trade Agreement (Congressional Research Service)
    • "NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters."
  • January 2016: NAFTA's Economic Impact (Council on Foreign Relations)
    • "Some fourteen million jobs rely on trade with Canada and Mexico, while the nearly two hundred thousand export-related jobs created annually by the pact pay 15 to 20 percent more on average than the jobs that were lost."
    • "Some jobs are lost due to imports, but others are created, and consumers benefit significantly from the falling prices and often improved quality of goods created by import competition. A 2014 PIIE study of NAFTA's effects found that about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to the pact—but that for each of those jobs lost, the economy gains roughly $450,000 in the form of higher productivity and lower consumer prices."
    • "The steepest decline in manufacturing jobs, which fell from seventeen million to eleven million between 2000 and 2010, is mostly attributable to trade with China and underlying technological changes."
    • "By contributing to the development of cross-border supply chains, NAFTA lowered costs, increased productivity, and improved U.S. competitiveness. This meant shedding some jobs in the United States as positions moved to Mexico, he argues, but without the pact, even more would have otherwise been lost."
  • May 2014: NAFTA at 20 (Peterson Institute for International Economics)
  • March 2004: NAFTA and its Impact on the United States
    • "The last positive impact has been a slight increase in United States jobs in the agricultural industry....NAFTA has enabled United States agricultural producers and consumers to more effectively use their comparative advantages and to respond more efficiently to changing economic conditions. Although the free trade agreement has caused some negative impacts, the positive impacts seem to outweigh them. This is especially true for the agricultural industry in the United States, in which agricultural growth has been phenomenal."
  • Winter 2001: The Impact of NAFTA on the United States
    • "The broad consensus from research in the early 1990s suggested that these fears [of job loss] were overstated. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (1993) estimated that the total number of U.S. workers who might have to change their jobs due to NAFTA was likely to be substantially less than half a million, spread out over at least a decade. To put this number in perspective, the CBO noted that in the 1980s, nearly 20 million workers lost their jobs and were not recalled by their former employers. Similarly, a Department of Labor (1992) survey of potential employment effects of NAFTA found that sectoral employment changes would be small, in most cases less than 2 percent of current sectoral employment and much less than normal turnover rates."
    • "Congress and the Clinton administration, concerned that even employment effects which were small in the aggregate appeared likely to be concentrated by industry and region, enacted NAFTA-TAA as part of the NAFTA implementing legislation. NAFTA-TAA expands the trade adjustment benefits, which were originally established in the 1962 Trade Expansion Act, by providing job training as well as additional income support for workers displaced by imports from Mexico and Canada."
    • "As of July 1999, the U.S. Department of Labor had certified 238,051 workers for NAFTA-TAA, an average of 3662 workers per month. While these numbers probably understate the displacement due to NAFTA because some qualified workers did not apply, they are still quite low in the context of U.S. labor markets."
    • "Many post-NAFTA studies describe the effects of increased U.S. imports on jobs. ... They find that the job impact is relatively small, with the total estimated potential job impact in the United States from 1990-97 due to imports from Mexico at 299,000, or an average of 37,000 jobs lost per year due to increased Mexican trade. To put this number in perspective, they note that the U.S. economy has been creating over 200,000 jobs per month."
    • "The International Trade Commission [analyzed] 120 manufacturing sectors. It found seven sectors in which imports from NAFTA countries had an adverse effect on employment, four sectors where imports had a positive effect on employment, and in all other sectors imports had no effect on employment."
    • "The U.S. Department of Agriculture (1997) used a dynamic computable general equilibrium model to assess the effects of NAFTA on rural employment. They calculate the changes in employment with and without NAFTA, finding that U.S. rural employment in 1996 is 0.07 percent higher with NAFTA than it would be without the agreement, with the greatest increases in non-grain crops."
    • "Most fears about the ill effects of NAFTA on the U.S. auto industry, whether in term of employment, wages, or investment, have been proven wrong. The U.S. auto industry did experience rationalization of production and hence job displacements. But overall, NAFTA appears to have helped the U.S. auto sector (U.S. Trade Representative, 1997). Employment in the American automotive industry grew by 14.1 percent overall, with an increase of 16.1 percent in the auto parts sector and 10.1 percent in the motor vehicle assembly sector from 1994-1996. Hourly earnings for production workers in the U.S. automotive sector grew by 5.6 percent between 1993 and 1996. The Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers invested $39.1 billion from 1993 to 1996 in new manufacturing plants and equipment in the United States, while investing only $3 billion in Mexico over the same period."
    • "We find a dramatic increase in intra-industry trade in autos and parts. In 1993, for example, intra-industry trade in autos represented 52 percent of all North American trade in autos; by 1999, it was 79 percent. As the U.S. Trade Representative (1997) notes, U.S. imports of vehicles assembled in Mexico include a high percentage of auto parts made in the United States. There appear to be efficiency gains from finer specialization within the industry. These gains do not appear to be “Ricardian,” in that they are not primarily based on different national factor proportions, but “Smithian” in the sense that NAFTA widened the extent of the market and permitted increasing returns to finer specialization."
    • "Since the passage of NAFTA, U.S. textile production has increased, although textile and apparel employment both continue to decline. Technological change has been the main factor causing job loss, while also accounting for higher wages among remaining workers. NAFTA, with its strong rules of origin, actually preserved U.S. jobs in the textile and apparel industries, contrary to pre-NAFTA fears that jobs would be lost to Mexico."
    • "NAFTA, with its strong rules of origin, actually preserved U.S. jobs in the textile and apparel industries, contrary to pre-NAFTA fears that jobs would be lost to Mexico. According to the U.S. Trade Representative (1997), two-thirds of the value of U.S. textiles and apparel imported from Mexico in 1996 was comprised of originally U.S. content. In contrast, Asian textile and apparel products have almost no U.S. content."
It may also or instead be because you've only read from partisan sources rather than impartial and rigorously considered sources of information.
  • The Politics and Economics of Offshore Outsourcing
    Outsourcing appears to be connected to increased U.S. employment and investment rather than to overall job loss. Some U.S. jobs are certainly lost to other countries. On the whole, however, firms involved with offshore outsourcing are not shifting net jobs overseas but instead are creating jobs both in the United States and in other countries.
It could also be because you haven't looked for credible and rigorously developed research and information that counters the mantra that free trade has a net negative impact on employment. It could even be that you have a "TL;WR" attitude about the documents that show the rigorously researched facts that show free trade does not have a net negative impact on employment.


Though I am a strong advocate of drinking from the well of rigorous research for that's where one finds content that clearly explains the methodology, shows the math that supports the analysis, and so on, there also exist non-scholarly reports and discussion that

Looking at the Job Loss Matter:
How much of these job losses can be attributed to the impact of NAFTA? Wharton management professor Mauro Guillen has a very different view, suggesting that without NAFTA, many jobs that were lost over this period would probably have gone to China or elsewhere. “Perhaps NAFTA accelerated the process, but it did not make a huge difference. At the same time, a lot of jobs were created in the U.S. that wouldn’t be there without the Mexico trade. I’m not just talking about Texas or California or Arizona…. Many of the products made in Mexico are designed in the United States. So there are a lot of jobs created here.”

Walter Kemmsies, chief economist at Moffatt Nichol, an international infrastructure consultancy, notes that close to 40% of what the U.S. imports from Mexico is derived from U.S. sources. “This is the symbol of the success of NAFTA.” Twenty years ago, he estimates, that percentage was less than 5%.

Overall, has NAFTA been a good thing? Morris Cohen, Wharton professor of operations and information management, states that for many years, “economists have been arguing about whether global trade is a net benefit or net cost; who are the winners and who are the losers. There has been lots of ink spilled on that issue. The consensus from my perspective is that trade is generally a good thing; it helps to elevate the standard of living and it raises the level of economic activity on both sides. But there’s a net transfer sometimes, and definitely the notion of winners and losers. We don’t have the luxury of being able to have done the experiment [to find out] what would have happened had there been no NAFTA.” Or, he adds, to figure out to what extent the conditions that exist today are a result of NAFTA, or not the result.
​

So, while, yes, free trade, and NAFTA in particular, can and does cost some jobs. Does it, or at least the NAFTA free trade agreement -- Lord only knows why folks rail so loudly against NAFTA; it's not our only free trade agreement -- result in job losses that justify all the rancor and rhetoric we hear these days? Not even close, although, I'm sure the relatively few folks (amongst the 250M+ American workforce) who've lost their jobs due to NAFTA won't see it that way. The thing is that neither will folks like you who fail to critically/objectively question and answer whether NAFTA or something else might in fact be the cause of the lost jobs.
Click to expand...
I cannot accurately attest to why you have yet to read what you have not read.........
It might be for any number of reasons, one of which may be that you haven't read the documents to which I linked or others.

I did look through the documents which you linked, there is nothing there that refutes my statement. Quite the opposite actually.
A 2014 PIIE study of NAFTA's effects found that about 15,000 jobs on net are lost each year due to the pact
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

Blue:
With that I bestow upon you the "Form over Substance" award.

Why?

320 Years of History said:
So, while, yes, free trade, and NAFTA in particular, can and does cost some jobs. Does it, or at least the NAFTA free trade agreement -- Lord only knows why folks rail so loudly against NAFTA; it's not our only free trade agreement -- result in job losses that justify all the rancor and rhetoric we hear these days? Not even close...
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
But you took exception to my very simple and accurate statement. If you like we can go a bit deeper.

The job losses that were espoused by PIIE only took into account trade with Mexico not Canada. And the numbers came with a qualifier, "In recent years" which wasn't quantified.
In recent years, net US jobs lost on account of two-way trade with Mexico have averaged about 15,000 annually (203,000 jobs displaced by imports minus 188,000 jobs supported by imports).
Click to expand...
Next we have to take into account the credibility of the Peterson Institute. The Board of Directors is a who's who of business people who would be the very people who would benefit the most from the added growth of the economy that is supposed to be the upside to the displacement of workers.

MEMBERS OF THE BOARD
Peter G. Peterson * (Chairman of the Board)
Founder and Chairman, Peter G. Peterson Foundation; former Senior Chairman, The Blackstone Group; former Secretary of Commerce and Assistant to the President for International Economic Policy
James W. Owens * (Chairman of the Executive Committee)
Chairman and CEO Emeritus of Caterpillar
Caroline Atkinson
Head of Global Policy, Google, Inc.
Ajay Banga
President and Chief Executive Officer, MasterCard
C. Fred Bergsten *
Senior Fellow and Director Emeritus, Peterson Institute for International Economics; former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs
Mark T. Bertolini
Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President, Aetna
Ben van Beurden
CEO, Royal Dutch Shell
Nancy Birdsall
President, Center for Global Development; former Executive Vice-President of the Inter-American Development Bank
Frank Brosens
Principal, Cofounder, Taconic Capital Advisors L.P.
Ronnie C. Chan
Chairman, Hang Lung Properties Limited
Susan M. Collins
Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of Public Policy, Professor of Public Policy, and Professor of Economics, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan
Richard N. Cooper
Maurits C. Boas Professor of International Economics, Harvard University
Andreas C. Dracopoulos *
Director and co-President, Stavros Niarchos Foundation
Barry Eichengreen
Professor, Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley
Jessica Einhorn *
Former Dean, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University; former Managing Director for Finance and Resource Mobilization, World Bank
Peter Fisher
Senior Director, BlackRock Investment Institute; former Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance
Douglas Flint
Group Chairman, HSBC Holdings plc.
Stephen Freidheim *
CIO, Founder and Managing Partner, Cyrus Capital Partners, LLC.
Jacob A. Frenkel
Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, former Governor of the Bank of Israel; former IMF Economic Counselor and Director of Research.
Maurice R. Greenberg
Chairman and CEO, C.V. Starr and Co., Inc.; former Chairman, American International Group.
Herbjorn Hansson
Chairman and CEO, Nordic American Tankers Limited.
Stephen Howe, Jr.
US Chairman and Americas Managing Partner, Ernst & Young LLP
Hugh F. Johnston
Chief Financial Officer, PepsiCo, Inc.
Michael Klein
Managing Partner of M. Klein and Company, LLC; former Vice Chairman, Citigroup.
Nobuyori Kodaira
Executive Vice President and Member of the Board of Directors, Toyota Motor Corporation
Charles D. Lake II
President, Aflac International Incorporated, and Chairman, Aflac Japan.
Andrew N. Liveris
Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Dow Chemical Company.
Sergio Marchionne
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Chrysler Group LLC; Chief Executive Officer, Fiat S.p.A., and Chairman, Fiat Industrial S.p.A. and CNH Global N.V.
Pip McCrostie
Global Vice Chair – Transaction Advisory Services, EY.
Hutham S. Olayan *
President and CEO, Olayan America.
Peter R. Orszag
Vice Chairman of Investment Banking and Managing Director, Lazard Freres & Co.
Michael A. Peterson *
President and Chief Operating Officer, Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
Jonathan Pruzan
Chief Financial Officer, Morgan Stanley
Ginni M. Rometty
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, International Business Machines Corporation.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild *
CEO and President, E.L. Rothschild Limited.
Richard E. Salomon *
Managing Partner, East End Advisors, LLC.
Sheikh Hamad Saud Al-Sayari
Former Governor, Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency.
Lawrence H. Summers *
Charles W. Eliot University Professor, Harvard University; former Secretary of the Treasury; former Chair of the National Economic Council.
Mostafa Terrab
Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, President, OCP S.A.
Ronald A. Williams
Retired Chairman and CEO, Aetna Inc.
Min Zhu
Deputy Managing Director, International Monetary Fund
Robert B. Zoellick *
Chairman, International Country Advisors, Goldman Sachs & Company; former President, World Bank Group; former US Trade Representative.
HONORARY DIRECTORS
George David
Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, United Technologies Corporation.
Alan Greenspan
Former Chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; former President and Chief Executive Officer, Townsend-Greenspan and Co.; former Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers.
Carla A. Hills
Chairman, Hills & Company; former United States Trade Representative; former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Frank E. Loy
Chairman, Board of Directors, Resources for the Future; Acting Chair, Board of Directors, Populations Services International; former Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs; former Chairman of the Board, League of Conservation Voters; former President, German Marshall Fund of the United States; former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs.
David Rockefeller
Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Chase Manhattan.
George P. Shultz
Honorary Fellow, Hoover Institution; former Secretary of State; President and Director of Bechtel Group, Inc.; Secretary of the Treasury; Director, Office of Management and Budget; and Secretary of Labor.
Jean-Claude Trichet
Chairman of the Group of Thirty; former President, European Central Bank; former Governor, Banque de France; former Director of the Treasury, government of France.
Paul A. Volcker
Henry Kaufman Visiting Professor, New York University Stern School of Business; former Chairman, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; former Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs.
Ernesto Zedillo
Former President of Mexico.

Now if we look at another document you linked to we can see a slightly different number being placed on the loss of jobs to NAFTA, which also supports my very simple statement.
Economists like the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s (CEPR) Dean Baker and the Economic Policy Institute argue that this surge of imports caused the loss of up to 600,000 U.S. jobs over two decades, though they admit that some of this import growth would likely have happened even without NAFTA.
Click to expand...
http://www.cfr.org/trade/naftas-economic-impact/p15790

The other thing we need to keep in mind is that NAFTA was a localized trade agreement, it's effects are admittedly small. I wonder if you want to start looking at the numbers of lost jobs due to normalization of trade with China.
 
bear513 said:
The Irish Ram said:
GaryDog said:
The Irish Ram said:
You over think. The sun heats up, the sun cools down. We warm and cool as a result.
Global warming was too specific, and scientifically deniable. What they are calling it now is climate change. How many can argue that climates change? Free yourself from the belief that all of that money that we are pouring into the world bank has anything to do with the environment. It is actually a money redistribution scam of the UN's. Our money to whomever wants some. It has to stop.
Click to expand...

Exhibit A of OP's point /\/\/\/\
Click to expand...

If the people who are giddy about being able to redistribute our money tell you, out of their own mouths, that this money grab has nothing to with the environment, tells you to free yourself from that line of thinking, and re-iterates that it is a redistribution of wealth plan,and you still don't get it, then you are too brainwashed to try to get through to. For the last time:

IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”
De facto means actually, or in reality. You need a dose of reality. Global warming is an illusion, like magicians use, to trick the eye and mind.

Here's the real reason for your climate change:
In Their Own Words: Climate Alarmists Debunk Their 'Science'
Click to expand...

Exactly I don't want to talk about boring science stuff like C02 ppms, because we know during in the dino era it had 5 times more CO2 in the atmosphere, it has been suggested during the Roman era it has been much warmer, using science we know the deaths history always changed and has been known to change in a blink of an eye like the great Sahara changing tropical to dry fast in cosmic terms.

My specialty is politics news and currant events, my other specialty is temperature instruments been using them for over 30 years and I know how they evolved and how different people read and record them different

I want to talk motives behind the science I want to know facts

Just like gruber and obama manipulating obama care to the public to get it passed and once they succeeded to get it passed an the genie out of the bottle..
They just shrugged their shoulders and said "we bad" with a grin.

The Gruber Confession
.
Click to expand...

The article you cited provides a fine illustration of not knowing what one is talking about.

Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which issues gold-standard cost estimates of any legislative proposal: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes.” Why? Because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” And yet, the president himself openly insisted that the individual mandate — what you must pay the government if you fail to buy health insurance — was not a tax.​

The fact of the matter is that what is and is not a tax is a matter of legal definition. The sum one must pay for failing to buy health insurance is not a tax. Why isn't it? Because it is a fine, a penalty. What's the difference?
  • Being subject to a tax is not avoidable by law abiding people (even for folks who have no tax liability). That's so of ad valorem, transfer, gratuitous transfer, tariffs and income taxes. For all of them whether one is subject to them is not a matter of one's own volition. One might obtain an exemption or credit or other concession that absolves one from having to pay a given tax liability, but that doesn't alter the fact that one was nonetheless subject to the tax. Everyone is subject to a given tax even if everyone doesn't actually incur a tax debt.
  • A fine is entirely avoidable. Nobody is involuntarily subject to a fine.
Is the distinction noted above reflective of the abstruse details of law? Absolutely it is; however, as taxes and fines payable to a governmental body are only mandated/enforceable by law, it isn't unreasonable to demand that one know the legal definition of tax vs. law and adhere to it when discussing what is and what is not a tax.

Is there any difference in terms of what sum leaves one's own pocket and enters governmental coffers? Perhaps not, but that's not the point. What is the point, as goes Charles Krauthammer's opinion is that there is no excuse for his failing to distinguish between what is a tax and "what feels like a tax even though it's not actually a tax." I don't what words he may have chosen to communicate to readers that there is a distinction so long as he did so. Well informed readers of his column will know that the penalty for not adhering to the "mandate" isn't a tax; poorly informed readers may not and thus come, if only by dint of their regard for Mr. Krauthammer, to think it in fact is a tax.

Note:
Do I think everything need be distilled to the level of detail noted above? No, of course not. On matters of law or accounting, for example, "hair splitting" is at the heart of what can and often does make very material differences between what's allowable and what's not. Context determines when form rightly carries equal weight with substance.
 
320 Years of History said:
bear513 said:
The Irish Ram said:
GaryDog said:
The Irish Ram said:
You over think. The sun heats up, the sun cools down. We warm and cool as a result.
Global warming was too specific, and scientifically deniable. What they are calling it now is climate change. How many can argue that climates change? Free yourself from the belief that all of that money that we are pouring into the world bank has anything to do with the environment. It is actually a money redistribution scam of the UN's. Our money to whomever wants some. It has to stop.
Click to expand...

Exhibit A of OP's point /\/\/\/\
Click to expand...

If the people who are giddy about being able to redistribute our money tell you, out of their own mouths, that this money grab has nothing to with the environment, tells you to free yourself from that line of thinking, and re-iterates that it is a redistribution of wealth plan,and you still don't get it, then you are too brainwashed to try to get through to. For the last time:

IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”
De facto means actually, or in reality. You need a dose of reality. Global warming is an illusion, like magicians use, to trick the eye and mind.

Here's the real reason for your climate change:
In Their Own Words: Climate Alarmists Debunk Their 'Science'
Click to expand...

Exactly I don't want to talk about boring science stuff like C02 ppms, because we know during in the dino era it had 5 times more CO2 in the atmosphere, it has been suggested during the Roman era it has been much warmer, using science we know the deaths history always changed and has been known to change in a blink of an eye like the great Sahara changing tropical to dry fast in cosmic terms.

My specialty is politics news and currant events, my other specialty is temperature instruments been using them for over 30 years and I know how they evolved and how different people read and record them different

I want to talk motives behind the science I want to know facts

Just like gruber and obama manipulating obama care to the public to get it passed and once they succeeded to get it passed an the genie out of the bottle..
They just shrugged their shoulders and said "we bad" with a grin.

The Gruber Confession
.
Click to expand...

The article you cited provides a fine illustration of not knowing what one is talking about.

Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which issues gold-standard cost estimates of any legislative proposal: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes.” Why? Because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” And yet, the president himself openly insisted that the individual mandate — what you must pay the government if you fail to buy health insurance — was not a tax.​

The fact of the matter is that what is and is not a tax is a matter of legal definition. The sum one must pay for failing to buy health insurance is not a tax. Why isn't it? Because it is a fine, a penalty. What's the difference?
  • Being subject to a tax is not avoidable by law abiding people (even for folks who have no tax liability). That's so of ad valorem, transfer, gratuitous transfer, tariffs and income taxes. For all of them whether one is subject to them is not a matter of one's own volition. One might obtain an exemption or credit or other concession that absolves one from having to pay a given tax liability, but that doesn't alter the fact that one was nonetheless subject to the tax. Everyone is subject to a given tax even if everyone doesn't actually incur a tax debt.
  • A fine is entirely avoidable. Nobody is involuntarily subject to a fine.
Is the distinction noted above reflective of the abstruse details of law? Absolutely it is; however, as taxes and fines payable to a governmental body are only mandated/enforceable by law, it isn't unreasonable to demand that one know the legal definition of tax vs. law and adhere to it when discussing what is and what is not a tax.

Is there any difference in terms of what sum leaves one's own pocket and enters governmental coffers? Perhaps not, but that's not the point. What is the point, as goes Charles Krauthammer's opinion is that there is no excuse for his failing to distinguish between what is a tax and "what feels like a tax even though it's not actually a tax." I don't what words he may have chosen to communicate to readers that there is a distinction so long as he did so. Well informed readers of his column will know that the penalty for not adhering to the "mandate" isn't a tax; poorly informed readers may not and thus come, if only by dint of their regard for Mr. Krauthammer, to think it in fact is a tax.

Note:
Do I think everything need be distilled to the level of detail noted above? No, of course not. On matters of law or accounting, for example, "hair splitting" is at the heart of what can and often does make very material differences between what's allowable and what's not. Context determines when form rightly carries equal weight with substance.
Click to expand...


The fact of the matter is that what is and is not a tax is a matter of legal definition.



Seriously dude and your the one who says I don't know what I am talking about? Him what did the supreme court say about the mandate to approve it?



It was a tax....

There for obama care should never been legal because the Bill originated in the Senate.
 
Tehon said:
But you took exception to my very simple and accurate statement. If you like we can go a bit deeper.
Click to expand...

I knew you'd be coming with that....I addressed it below...

320 Years of History said:
Note:
Do I think everything need be distilled to the level of detail noted above? No, of course not. On matters of law or accounting, for example, "hair splitting" is at the heart of what can and often does make very material differences between what's allowable and what's not. Context determines when form rightly carries equal weight with substance.
Click to expand...

As I stated in my remarks, yes, free trade agreements have cost jobs. That is absolutely correct. I didn't and do not deny the absolute truth of that statement. All the remarks I've presented have been themed on the relative insignificance of those jobs having been lost and the dramatic and comparatively greater benefit the economy has realized in frp, implementing free trade in exchange for losing a some thousands of jobs. What's not sagacious about pointing out that free trade has cost jobs is that the quantity of jobs it has cost relative to the quantity of job that exist is immaterial in an economic sense, even though to the individuals whose jobs clearly disappeared due to the impact of free trade won't find it so.

You will note that I stated context matters. The matter of free trade and job loss is one of choices, the choice between whether accepting (begrudgingly if necessary) minor losses in one dimension in order to realize greater gains in another.
  • 1,500 jobs lost; 35K jobs lost; 200K jobs lost -- take your pick -- in exchange for gains to the U.S. economy ranging from $400K to $900K per lost job (see post #4 and the related references for the calculation of those sums)...that's not a bad exchange for it's all but certain the jobs lost didn't contribute $400K+ each to the economy or to the individual fortunes of the folks who lost them.

The point you made about job loss is one that, like my remarks about what is and is not a tax, speaks to the difference between absolute accuracy and relative accuracy. In law and accounting, absolute accuracy is relevant and usually required. In macroeconomics, it's all about relative accuracy and materiality. (Make no mistake, materiality comes into play with accounting and law too, but not in quite the same way as it does in macroeconomics.) I would expect that anyone would understand that given the "macro" scale of what macroeconomic policy like national free trade agreements entails.

I seriously doubt that anyone, any economist, expected no single job would be lost do to the implementation of free trade agreements. The point from the very start of the NAFTA and other free trade agreements has been that the net gains from free trade would be greater than the net losses. Time and time again, it's been show that prediction/expectation has held true. That is the point and your having failed to recognize it in your remark is why I accorded you the "award" I did.
 
bear513 said:
320 Years of History said:
bear513 said:
The Irish Ram said:
GaryDog said:
The Irish Ram said:
You over think. The sun heats up, the sun cools down. We warm and cool as a result.
Global warming was too specific, and scientifically deniable. What they are calling it now is climate change. How many can argue that climates change? Free yourself from the belief that all of that money that we are pouring into the world bank has anything to do with the environment. It is actually a money redistribution scam of the UN's. Our money to whomever wants some. It has to stop.
Click to expand...

Exhibit A of OP's point /\/\/\/\
Click to expand...

If the people who are giddy about being able to redistribute our money tell you, out of their own mouths, that this money grab has nothing to with the environment, tells you to free yourself from that line of thinking, and re-iterates that it is a redistribution of wealth plan,and you still don't get it, then you are too brainwashed to try to get through to. For the last time:

IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”
De facto means actually, or in reality. You need a dose of reality. Global warming is an illusion, like magicians use, to trick the eye and mind.

Here's the real reason for your climate change:
In Their Own Words: Climate Alarmists Debunk Their 'Science'
Click to expand...

Exactly I don't want to talk about boring science stuff like C02 ppms, because we know during in the dino era it had 5 times more CO2 in the atmosphere, it has been suggested during the Roman era it has been much warmer, using science we know the deaths history always changed and has been known to change in a blink of an eye like the great Sahara changing tropical to dry fast in cosmic terms.

My specialty is politics news and currant events, my other specialty is temperature instruments been using them for over 30 years and I know how they evolved and how different people read and record them different

I want to talk motives behind the science I want to know facts

Just like gruber and obama manipulating obama care to the public to get it passed and once they succeeded to get it passed an the genie out of the bottle..
They just shrugged their shoulders and said "we bad" with a grin.

The Gruber Confession
.
Click to expand...

The article you cited provides a fine illustration of not knowing what one is talking about.

Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which issues gold-standard cost estimates of any legislative proposal: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes.” Why? Because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” And yet, the president himself openly insisted that the individual mandate — what you must pay the government if you fail to buy health insurance — was not a tax.​

The fact of the matter is that what is and is not a tax is a matter of legal definition. The sum one must pay for failing to buy health insurance is not a tax. Why isn't it? Because it is a fine, a penalty. What's the difference?
  • Being subject to a tax is not avoidable by law abiding people (even for folks who have no tax liability). That's so of ad valorem, transfer, gratuitous transfer, tariffs and income taxes. For all of them whether one is subject to them is not a matter of one's own volition. One might obtain an exemption or credit or other concession that absolves one from having to pay a given tax liability, but that doesn't alter the fact that one was nonetheless subject to the tax. Everyone is subject to a given tax even if everyone doesn't actually incur a tax debt.
  • A fine is entirely avoidable. Nobody is involuntarily subject to a fine.
Is the distinction noted above reflective of the abstruse details of law? Absolutely it is; however, as taxes and fines payable to a governmental body are only mandated/enforceable by law, it isn't unreasonable to demand that one know the legal definition of tax vs. law and adhere to it when discussing what is and what is not a tax.

Is there any difference in terms of what sum leaves one's own pocket and enters governmental coffers? Perhaps not, but that's not the point. What is the point, as goes Charles Krauthammer's opinion is that there is no excuse for his failing to distinguish between what is a tax and "what feels like a tax even though it's not actually a tax." I don't what words he may have chosen to communicate to readers that there is a distinction so long as he did so. Well informed readers of his column will know that the penalty for not adhering to the "mandate" isn't a tax; poorly informed readers may not and thus come, if only by dint of their regard for Mr. Krauthammer, to think it in fact is a tax.

Note:
Do I think everything need be distilled to the level of detail noted above? No, of course not. On matters of law or accounting, for example, "hair splitting" is at the heart of what can and often does make very material differences between what's allowable and what's not. Context determines when form rightly carries equal weight with substance.
Click to expand...


The fact of the matter is that what is and is not a tax is a matter of legal definition.

Seriously dude and your the one who says I don't know what I am talking about? Him what did the supreme court say about the mandate to approve it?

It was a tax....

There for obama care should never been legal because the Bill originated in the Senate.
Click to expand...

Okay...you tell me. What makes it a tax and not a fine? What distinguishes a governmentally assessed fine from a governmentally assessed tax?
 
320 Years of History said:
Tehon said:
But you took exception to my very simple and accurate statement. If you like we can go a bit deeper.
Click to expand...

I knew you'd be coming with that....I addressed it below...

320 Years of History said:
Note:
Do I think everything need be distilled to the level of detail noted above? No, of course not. On matters of law or accounting, for example, "hair splitting" is at the heart of what can and often does make very material differences between what's allowable and what's not. Context determines when form rightly carries equal weight with substance.
Click to expand...

As I stated in my remarks, yes, free trade agreements have cost jobs. That is absolutely correct. I didn't and do not deny the absolute truth of that statement. All the remarks I've presented have been themed on the relative insignificance of those jobs having been lost and the dramatic and comparatively greater benefit the economy has realized in frp, implementing free trade in exchange for losing a some thousands of jobs. What's not sagacious about pointing out that free trade has cost jobs is that the quantity of jobs it has cost relative to the quantity of job that exist is immaterial in an economic sense, even though to the individuals whose jobs clearly disappeared due to the impact of free trade won't find it so.

You will note that I stated context matters. The matter of free trade and job loss is one of choices, the choice between whether accepting (begrudgingly if necessary) minor losses in one dimension in order to realize greater gains in another.
  • 1,500 jobs lost; 35K jobs lost; 200K jobs lost -- take your pick -- in exchange for gains to the U.S. economy ranging from $400K to $900K per lost job (see post #4 and the related references for the calculation of those sums)...that's not a bad exchange for it's all but certain the jobs lost didn't contribute $400K+ each to the economy or to the individual fortunes of the folks who lost them.

The point you made about job loss is one that, like my remarks about what is and is not a tax, speaks to the difference between absolute accuracy and relative accuracy. In law and accounting, absolute accuracy is relevant and usually required. In macroeconomics, it's all about relative accuracy and materiality. (Make no mistake, materiality comes into play with accounting and law too, but not in quite the same way as it does in macroeconomics.) I would expect that anyone would understand that given the "macro" scale of what macroeconomic policy like national free trade agreements entails.

I seriously doubt that anyone, any economist, expected no single job would be lost do to the implementation of free trade agreements. The point from the very start of the NAFTA and other free trade agreements has been that the net gains from free trade would be greater than the net losses. Time and time again, it's been show that prediction/expectation has held true. That is the point and your having failed to recognize it in your remark is why I accorded you the "award" I did.
Click to expand...
I seriously doubt that anyone, any economist, expected no single job would be lost do to the implementation of free trade agreements.

In 1993, Gary Hufbauer and Jeffrey Schott of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) projected that NAFTA would lead to a rising U.S. trade surplus with Mexico, which would create 170,000 net new jobs in the United States. 8
Click to expand...
http://www.citizen.org/documents/NAFTAs-Broken-Promises.pdf

The point from the very start of the NAFTA and other free trade agreements has been that the net gains from free trade would be greater than the net losses.

Free trade has been a drain on our society as a whole. The gains accrue in the top percentiles of the economic ladder. You know, the likes of those that promote free trade like the BoD of Peterson Institute.
Telling a displaced worker that he can purchase a lead tainted toy for his kids on the cheap doesn't count as a net gain.
 
Okay...you tell me. What makes it a tax and not a fine? What distinguishes a governmentally assessed fine from a governmentally assessed tax?
Click to expand...


That is like asking which socket you should stick a knife in, the top one or the bottom one.
Instead, ask who is going to have to reach into their pocket to pay either of those, fine or tax. All of a sudden, semantics seems a waste of time.
 
320 Years of History said:
bear513 said:
320 Years of History said:
bear513 said:
The Irish Ram said:
GaryDog said:
Exhibit A of OP's point /\/\/\/\
Click to expand...

If the people who are giddy about being able to redistribute our money tell you, out of their own mouths, that this money grab has nothing to with the environment, tells you to free yourself from that line of thinking, and re-iterates that it is a redistribution of wealth plan,and you still don't get it, then you are too brainwashed to try to get through to. For the last time:

IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”
De facto means actually, or in reality. You need a dose of reality. Global warming is an illusion, like magicians use, to trick the eye and mind.

Here's the real reason for your climate change:
In Their Own Words: Climate Alarmists Debunk Their 'Science'
Click to expand...

Exactly I don't want to talk about boring science stuff like C02 ppms, because we know during in the dino era it had 5 times more CO2 in the atmosphere, it has been suggested during the Roman era it has been much warmer, using science we know the deaths history always changed and has been known to change in a blink of an eye like the great Sahara changing tropical to dry fast in cosmic terms.

My specialty is politics news and currant events, my other specialty is temperature instruments been using them for over 30 years and I know how they evolved and how different people read and record them different

I want to talk motives behind the science I want to know facts

Just like gruber and obama manipulating obama care to the public to get it passed and once they succeeded to get it passed an the genie out of the bottle..
They just shrugged their shoulders and said "we bad" with a grin.

The Gruber Confession
.
Click to expand...

The article you cited provides a fine illustration of not knowing what one is talking about.

Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which issues gold-standard cost estimates of any legislative proposal: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes.” Why? Because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” And yet, the president himself openly insisted that the individual mandate — what you must pay the government if you fail to buy health insurance — was not a tax.​

The fact of the matter is that what is and is not a tax is a matter of legal definition. The sum one must pay for failing to buy health insurance is not a tax. Why isn't it? Because it is a fine, a penalty. What's the difference?
  • Being subject to a tax is not avoidable by law abiding people (even for folks who have no tax liability). That's so of ad valorem, transfer, gratuitous transfer, tariffs and income taxes. For all of them whether one is subject to them is not a matter of one's own volition. One might obtain an exemption or credit or other concession that absolves one from having to pay a given tax liability, but that doesn't alter the fact that one was nonetheless subject to the tax. Everyone is subject to a given tax even if everyone doesn't actually incur a tax debt.
  • A fine is entirely avoidable. Nobody is involuntarily subject to a fine.
Is the distinction noted above reflective of the abstruse details of law? Absolutely it is; however, as taxes and fines payable to a governmental body are only mandated/enforceable by law, it isn't unreasonable to demand that one know the legal definition of tax vs. law and adhere to it when discussing what is and what is not a tax.

Is there any difference in terms of what sum leaves one's own pocket and enters governmental coffers? Perhaps not, but that's not the point. What is the point, as goes Charles Krauthammer's opinion is that there is no excuse for his failing to distinguish between what is a tax and "what feels like a tax even though it's not actually a tax." I don't what words he may have chosen to communicate to readers that there is a distinction so long as he did so. Well informed readers of his column will know that the penalty for not adhering to the "mandate" isn't a tax; poorly informed readers may not and thus come, if only by dint of their regard for Mr. Krauthammer, to think it in fact is a tax.

Note:
Do I think everything need be distilled to the level of detail noted above? No, of course not. On matters of law or accounting, for example, "hair splitting" is at the heart of what can and often does make very material differences between what's allowable and what's not. Context determines when form rightly carries equal weight with substance.
Click to expand...


The fact of the matter is that what is and is not a tax is a matter of legal definition.

Seriously dude and your the one who says I don't know what I am talking about? Him what did the supreme court say about the mandate to approve it?

It was a tax....

There for obama care should never been legal because the Bill originated in the Senate.
Click to expand...

Okay...you tell me. What makes it a tax and not a fine? What distinguishes a governmentally assessed fine from a governmentally assessed tax?
Click to expand...

Why what confuses you about a fine and a tax? That's easy ask me how debbitors prisions was abolished in the 1800s and why we still have them and call them civil suits~ now that confuses me

A tax is on say goods and services


A fine is on something You do illegaly say a parking ticket or hunting out of season.
 
320 Years of History said:
I just read a thread in which another member wrote the following:

Mac1958 said:
I don't visit this site to educate people on the basics.
Click to expand...
In another thread, I found myself having to write the following:
320 Years of History said:
[The question the member asked in a thread broadly themed on climate change] was "Parts of CO2 per million of what?" The OP is about CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. That makes the "what" be air, thus X parts of C02 per million liters of air.
Click to expand...
That wasn't my first answer to the member's inquiry. I thought initially s/he was unclear about the "ppm" abbreviation's meaning and context. I was wrong. That the ppm of CO2 was with regard to that compound's existence in air -- as opposed, perhaps, to rocks, water, dirt, etc. -- was the source of the member's uncertainty. Well, what can I say? I'm happy s/he got the information needed; that was the point of my bothering to answer the question.

I have to admit that it is variously frustrating and boring to find oneself in a political forum aiming to have a substantive discussion about XYZ topic that captures one's interest, only to find that some of the folks who are most willing to participate in the discussion routinely make remarks that show they need to be educated on the topic before either of you can get to having a meaningful debate/discussion. I'm not referring to learning what opinions are held by this or that proponent/opponent of a given policy; I mean just knowing the basic facts that have been long established and proven.

I'm not alone in not knowing about certain topics. One member seems to be quite "into" high finance topics. I don't generally have anything to say in those threads because I'm not all that interested in sophisticated financial investing topics; thus I don't know that much about it. And being uninterested in it, I don't intend to go find out about them in order to have a coherent/substantive discussion about them and their impacts. For other topics I didn't know much about them, but I care about them enough to research them. And yet other topics required little more than finding readily accessible credible/scholarly (not editorial) papers to include in my posts merely because I know that nobody here knows anything about me or what know "inside out" and what don't; thus I can't legitimately just say "XYZ is so" and expect to be taken seriously solely because "I" said so. (I can do that in my professional life, but my audience knows me. Y'all don't....that's got a lot to do with why many of my posts are long.)


At some point of late, I have come realize that in so much political discourse, understanding "the basics" is what so many lay writers and actual or would-be politicians either don't understand or ignore/disbelieve them even though they do understand them. Foremost among the subjects that I've noticed that happening is economics. For example:
  • Trade: Judging by the frequency with which we hear current politicians grousing about how free trade has been detrimental to the American economy, and the extent of support for free trade, one must infer that most folks simply refuse to accept free trade does more good than harm to an economy.

    Let's look at the basics of free trade.



    P = price; Q = quantity; S = supply; D = demand; T = tariff
    (For you math whizzes, yes, economists see quantity supplied as a function of price, even though economists present their graphs "backwards.")
    • The removal of tariffs leads to lower prices for consumers (Prices fall from P1 to P2)
    • This fall in prices enables an increase in consumer surplus of areas 1 + 2 + 3 + 4



    • Imports will increase from Q3-Q2 to Q4-Q1
    • The government will lose tax revenue of area 3. Tax revenue from imports was T (P1-P2) × (Q3-Q2)
    • Domestic firms producing this good will sell less and lose producer surplus equal to area 1
    • However overall there will be an increase in economic welfare of (2+4) (calculated as (1+2+3+4) – (1+3))
    • The magnitude of this increase depends upon the elasticity of supply and demand. If demand elastic consumers will have a big increase in welfare
    • Essentially, removing tariffs leads to lower prices for consumers – so the price of imported food, clothes and computers will be cheaper.

Free trade has become the scapegoat for politicians and voters. Free trade, they say, is the reason so many folks are unemployed or not employed as they would like to be (mis-/under employed). It's no wonder that it is. It's easy to point the finger at free trade because most folks aren't aware of the empirical underpinnings of how free trade actually works. Additionally and with beguiling intuitiveness, if producer moves its factory to another nation because wages are lower there, the person who lost their job thinks free trade is the cause.

Now one can take the basic principles above and test them by collecting data directly from the marketplace and measuring what impact(s) in fact a given free trade agreement has had on labor supply/suppliers. That, in fact, has been done. (Note, what follows is a listing of studies that examine and report what is, not what folks think about what is being what it is. In other words, it is not a listing of editorials/opinions.)
Additionally, one can consider the theorem of free trade to see how the math that supports the "big picture" basics given above actually works. Of course, doing that requires even more knowledge about econ and math, but frankly, one wants to be an economist student/professional one doesn't need to go that far because the matter of free trade and its benefits have been and are long and well understood. That they are so well understood is why they can be taught as they are using the graph above to undergraduates and high school students. That free trade produces more net gains than does un-free trade is a settled matter.

Sure a God made little green apples, I understand why individuals en masse grouse about free trade. As individuals, they see only that the labor they each have to supply is no longer in demand in the place where they are of a mind to supply it. That sucks if one is among those individuals. The thing is that free trade, indeed macroeconomics in general, doesn't care about John Brown or Margaret Green; it cares about and speaks to the state of an economy as a whole. Does that mean John and Margaret may get the short end of the stick? Yes, if they don't behave in a economically rational way, they most certainly may. The other thing is that elected leaders cannot reasonably be expected to manage the economy to John and Margaret's benefit; they must do so with regard to the economy on the whole.

Looking at some of the basics of free trade depicted above:
  • Do you see anything indicating free trade's goal or direct impacts have anything to do with labor? If you answered, "Yes. Free trade lowers the price of labor supplied/purchased in the market under consideration," you'd be correct.
  • Now ask yourself this.
    • Is a producer more or less likely to stay in business with higher or lower production costs?
    • Regardless of what one earns, will consumers find it easier or harder to purchase goods/services when prices are lower than they otherwise would be?
  • Now consider this:
    • Given the critical importance of comparative advantage in determining the gains from (free) trade, why is it that one rarely hears free trade's detractors make even a fleeting effort to identify what are America's comparative advantages?

      The answer is simple, but providing it dismays politicians who know damn well that the majority of their electorate don't have the first idea of what comparative advantage is. All most of those folks know is that they don't have the job they used to have or want to have. Pols usually know too that the truthful answer isn't all that comforting to "John" and "Margaret."

So where does that leave John and Margaret? Well, if they are willing to behave in an economically rational way, they have a few choices:
  • Supply a different kind of labor where they are.
  • Go to where the kind of labor they supply is in demand.
  • Go into business for themselves, thus becoming buyers and sellers of labor rather than solely sellers (producers) of it.
  • Do none of those things and suffer the consequences.
They have those choices because that's how it works in America. With freedom comes responsibility, and part of that responsibility is making rational economic choices for oneself. Were John and Margaret citizens in a nation with a command economy, they would be told on which of those choices they will act, but as Americans, they aren't going to be told. As Americans, they will have information made available to them about economics, the players in the economic game, policies that the government has or will implement, and so on. Using that information in a rational manner, John and Margaret are entrusted to, I suppose some would say "required to" or "burdened with," make(ing) rational choices about which of those courses of action they will take.

I'm no different than John and Margaret. I was part of the flood of business transformation projects that happened in the U.S. in the 1990s. U.S. companies were on the forefront of that process; thus I knew there would come a day when the U.S. companies that buy my (my competitors' similar) services will nearly all have completed their evolution to 21st century models. That is part and parcel why I began in the mid-1990s to build my skills and contacts for doing so outside the U.S. when the U.S. market for my services/skills dried up/contracted.

For today's up and coming workers, it should be blatantly apparent that globalization is here to stay. What does that mean? Well, I can't predict all the things it means for any specific individual, but one thing I can say is that the places in the world that haven't matured as has the U.S and Western Europe have are the places where the most rapid growth will occur. That's just how business/economic cycles work as they move from nascence to maturity, and each of us must apply that concept to our own situation.

If one is an American and wants to be part of that growth and reap some of the rewards, speaking one of the languages spoken where that growth will happen is going to be a big a plus, if not a necessity. I got started working internationally that I didn't have to speak anything other than English. My kids, however, will have to fluently speak something in addition to English, be it Spanish, Hindi or Mandarin/Cantonese or some other language, perhaps Arabic.


Sidebar:
FWIW, my kids went with Spanish as their main "other" language because there are more Spanish speaking democracies than there are Chinese or Arabic speaking ones, but they also speak and write passable, if not fluent, Mandarin...just in case fortune finds them from that direction...if it does, they are prepared to take advantage of the opportunity if/when it arrives. That's not luck happening; it's making one's own "luck." It's preparing to be able to reach out and and grab hold of an opportunity that comes one's way, even when it doesn't fall directly into one's lap.

You see, anyone can do this:

Baseball_Adult-Player-Catching-Fly-Ball-Two-Hands_01_300x350.jpg

If that's the limit of what a team's players can and will do, that team isn't going to the World Series.

The more prepared ones are prepared to and will do this -- which takes a far wider array of adroitness, will, verve and ability than does standing there and catching a ball that is headed right into one's uplifted glove -- if that's what it takes to achieve success:

Valley_V.jpg


ap_baseball_hall_of_fame_78668120.jpg


maxresdefault.jpg

It's not always solely about what one can or wants to do. It's about being prepared, given the "rules of the game," to do what one must to make it happen. Success -- economic, political, athletic, academic, etc. -- more often results from what one exerts oneself to the fullest extent to make happen than it does from waiting for someone else to make it happen for oneself. But, hey, one is free to wait on that "knight in shining armor" if one wants. For those folks, I hope he shows up. Far be it from me to insist one do otherwise.
​
End of sidebar.​
The aforementioned illustrations aside, let's return more directly to why I wrote what's above and cited the other member's and my own remarks at the start of this post (Note: it's not to discuss whether anyone aims to educate folks here)....

Researchers, in a report prepared for the National Council on Economic Education, state that 34% of respondents scored an "A" or "B" on an economics quiz that at best represents the tip of the iceberg of what constitutes "the basics" of economics.
All the more surprising is that 50% of the respondents indicated they had studied economics. That is surprising because the nature of the questions is exceedingly simple; one would expect, given the simplicity of the questions and having studied econ, at least 50% of the adults in the survey to have scored an "A" or "B" on the quiz. In fact, most of the quiz questions ask about the handful of things that are accurately intuited about economic principles. In my and others' opinion, a lot about economics isn't intuitive at all; one has to actually study and think pretty carefully about most econ principles and concepts. (If you were a "curve buster" in an econ class, or endured the outcome of there being a two or three of them in your econ class, you know what I'm talking about.) The impact of free trade vs. constrained trade is one such thing. (If you click on the preceding link, you'll find a discussion of the theory (science sense of the word) of comparative advantage along with a very good depiction intended for skeptics of free trade's net benefits over restricted trade.)

That study linked above is just one that discusses the insufficiency manifest among Americans in general when it comes to economic topics. Given their dearth of basic economic awareness, just how do folks justifiably ascribe to ideas such as "the middle class have been defrauded by the elite?" (Power elite, intellectual elite, monied elite, insiders, etc.) By what means do they know? Because someone who is among one of the "elite" says so in an effort to garner the "non elite's" support?

The fact is that nobody has misled the American people. What has happened is that people have allowed themselves to believe for topics that it's all "really quite simple." Well, making sense of those topics and how to manage one's affairs re: them is pretty simple if one understands them, but clearly, for many topics, most particularly economics and science, most folks don't. Even worse, they don't bother to get well informed (even at a basic level) on the topic. And the terrible thing about that is that it's just not that hard to do for a wide variety of subject. The factual and objective information is there for the taking.
The selected resources above are better places to go to find out the real "411" on whatever topic one might come across on CNN, Fox, or whatever other "pop" news source. For better or worse, commercial news and information outlets are useful for learning that a given topic is "hot" at the moment, but not all or often that good for obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the full scope of a matter, which, for most stuff these days, unlike 100 years ago, is what one needs in order to have rightfully have and reliably act upon one's opinion about it.
Click to expand...

You should check out SMS -- Short Messaging Systems.

Your rants are way too long.
 
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