Was Ross Perot Right?

http://www.creators.com/opinion/david-sirota/was-ross-perot-right.html

And so without further ado, let’s answer the question Clinton ducked: Was Ross Perot right?

In 1993, the Clinton White House and an army of corporate lobbyists were selling NAFTA as a way to aid Mexican and American workers.

Perot, on the other hand, was predicting that because the deal included no basic labor standards, it would preserve a huge “wage differential between the United States and Mexico” that would result in “the giant sucking sound” of American jobs heading south of the border. Corporations, he said, would “close the factories in the U.S. [and] move the factories to Mexico [to] take advantage of the cheap labor.”

 

The historical record is clear. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reports, “Real wages for most Mexicans today are lower than when NAFTA took effect.” Post-NAFTA, companies looking to exploit those low wages relocated factories to Mexico. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the net effect of NAFTA was the elimination of 1 million American jobs.

Score one for Perot.

Since then we’ve had the trade agreements that Bush signed with China and others.

Lest you think that government knows what they are doing, consider this quote from page 56 of the July 2010 Discover Magazine on the article about “The Streetlight Effect”.

In 1992 a now-classic study by researchers at Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research examined papers from a range of economics journals and determined that approximately none of them had conclusively proved anything one way or the other.  Given that dismal assessment–and given the great influence of economists on financial institutions and regulation — it’s a wonder the global economic infrastructure is not in far worse shape.

The hypothesis that our economy could be straightened out by reversing all of the laws that Washington has written in the last 20 years (including the trade agreements) is worth study.

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