Obama’s new tack on trade treaty
Over the past few weeks, defying the anti-trade rhetoric on the campaign trail, President Barack Obama has mounted a full-court press to get a vote on a big missing piece ofhis legacy: The Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The trade and investment deal with 13 Pacific Rim nations has been in progress for nearly his entire term. It’s cleared a couple of congressional hurdles but hit a roadblock with the populist surge of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, leading to Hillary Clinton’ s announcement that she wouldn’t support the deal for which she had helped lay the ground work.
Leaders in Congress have all but closed the door toa vote in the two short months they have to finish business after the election. Nevertheless, O ba ma and his lieutenants talk it upat every chance they get, in hopes that opinions will change once the polls close.
The problem is, they’re doing it with an argument that Americans may not care that much about.
In earlier stages of the T PP campaign, the administration pushed its economic benefits: By eliminating thousands of tariffs on U.S. goods in Asian countries, the White House argued, the deal would boost American exports, creating more jobs and higher wages. Even helping U.S. companies like Nike manufacture overseas could support design and engineering jobs at home.
Then, the economic an alyses of the TPP startedcoming back.The U.S. International Trade Commission found that the deal would only boost economic growth by 0.15 percent and employment by 0.07 percent over 15 years. The pro-trade Peterson Institute for International Economics found that T PP might raise wages but wouldn’ t meaningfully change employment. More skeptical economists at Tufts University determined the deal would actually decrease employment and economic growth in the United States.
With the economic case becoming difficult to make, backers of the trade deal shifted their emphasis to a geopolitical argument: The T PP is an essential manifestation of U.S. leadership, without which southeast Asia would be drawn inexorably into China’ s orbit, potentially undermining U.S. national security.