Word: nafta
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Over the long run, NAFTA will employ more of everybody -- Americans, Mexicans and Canadians -- and reduce prices for consumers. But undeniably, progress is not without cost. Peace is the same sort of problem: it throws some people out of work. But peace is so much more easily understood -- and sold -- than "free trade." We all know the costs of war. Just turn on the TV. It's less easy to see the costs of trade barriers. And of course they're less severe. But they're there. Just one example: surely Mexico's 20% tariff on American automobiles, which would...
...called another Democrat who plans to vote against NAFTA. I hardly needed to lecture him about economics; he has postgraduate degrees galore. Yet he ) sounded almost blase. The gist of his comment was that the past 12 years had been a time of high living on the backs of the working guy -- one defeat for labor after another -- so it was time to let labor win one. Congress would defeat NAFTA, he said. The President of Mexico would lose his job. They'd elect a new one, and in a year or two Canada, Mexico and the U.S. would negotiate...
...NAFTA were truly not in the overall, long-term interest of the American worker, my guess is Clinton would oppose it. Even as it was, he did not simply accept the document President Bush handed him. He insisted first on negotiating side agreements that speak to at least some of the concerns of environmentalists and labor...
What this whole thing really seems to hinge on is the polls. If Lee Iacocca can enlist Rush Limbaugh to persuade his listeners to rally round NAFTA, and if the Gore-Perot debate is scored on the basis of who's more right and responsible rather than who's funnier, the poll numbers will rise and NAFTA will pass...
...barest minimum, the results last week will fail to help Clinton win congressional support not only for NAFTA but for his health-care reform bill as well. Barbara Kennelly of Connecticut, a deputy Democratic whip in the House, fears that Clinton's health-care bill will become more vulnerable to attack -- wrongly, in her view -- as too expensive and too likely to promote a growth of government bureaucracy. On state and local levels at least, charges of excessive spending and too much bureaucracy have been proving lethal...