| sc94597 said: So what are Trump's solutions to all of this? Probably just as bad as Bernie's: tarriffs and exit taxes. Sorry those are archaic ideas left in the time of mercantilism. If we want to have costs of living go through the roof then we should vote for Trump. Otherwise I don't want to spend more for my clothing, electronics, and home appliances just because a group of people pushed all of their opportunities out of this country by unreasonable wage and benefit demands and now want protectionism to benefit only them. Sorry steel workers and car manufacturers, demanding $70,000 (when adjusted for inflation) salaries in the 1960's and 70's was ridiculous and foolish and they are now paying the consequences for it. Don't make the rest of us pay for their mistakes. |
Sander's has not promoted tariffs nor exit taxes. There is more support for free trade on the left than the right of the American political spectrum. Remember most free trade agreements have been passed with bipartisan support. When it comes to specific Sanders proposals on trade he has mostly talked not about raising more barriers but rather negotiating trade deals so that they better protect workers. These trade policies have been shown to increase income inequality by putting downward pressure on the wages of the lower to middle income sectors while putting upward pressure on the highest earners (this is acknowledged by many of the aforementioned policies creators). What you've written already implies you think that this is a natural and inevitable result of trade policy but the reality is that this was a result of the policy design. Trade deals like NAFTA specifically cut out protections for jobs in manufacturing whilst keeping those for higher earning service sectors in place and in some cases strengthening them. The reason you think that those salaries of 70k for manufacturers were unreasonable but today a salary of 240k for a phsycician seems fine is entirely a product of protectionism being allowed to fly by in those trade deals. It's just that the only class being protected are those who already made more money.
The TPP is an excellent example of this, we often hear about how it will eliminate 18,000 tariffs. Yet it is often unacknolwedged that the US only exports in roughly half those goods and the size of those tariffs are already remarkably small (roughly 1% or less for most of them). At the same time this "free-trade" deal is set to raise copyright and patent measures on pharmaceuticals and intellectual property in massive ways which introduce trade barriers that greatly outweigh the size of the tariffs in terms of their impact.
But back to what Sanders has actually proposed trade wise: more opening of trade, more reduction of trade barriers, but more protection for lower and middle income workers and less protection for those at the top (in this respect the TPP is better than previous trade deals, but as mentioned above it has other problems, also the I think it was the IMF which found that it would lead to a 0% impact on GDP). He has stated that he would instruct his State dept. to pressure for nations to raise their minimum wages as part of trade deals instead of the opposite (Hillary Clinton famously forced Haiti to slash its minimum wage in half just after it was raised at the behest of multinational corporations who would have had to pay more [.62/hr vs .41/hr]). Sanders has admittedly proposed few concrete measures on trade though, so I don't blame you for not knowing exactly what his stance is. So far he has not supported raising tariffs, he has taken issue with legislation which reduced tariffs but it has always been for reasons that have to do not with lowering tariffs and exit taxes, but with the lack of worker and environmental protections, the skew of protections towards higher-income service jobs, the secrecy of the negotiation process (especially in regards to TPP and TTIP). To quote Sanders himself:
“Nobody I know believes we should place a wall around this country. Trade is a good thing, but what we must begin doing is negotiating fair trade agreements that reflect the interests of working families in America, working families in other countries, and not just large multinational corporations and the CEOs who help write these trade agreements.”
