“Trump Abandons Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama’s Signature Trade Deal” (nytimes) says that the Trumpenfuhrer has done what both Hillary and Bernie suggested. The 5,000-page TPP is dead.
Given our heavy debt from pensions, bonds, etc., (at least five years of GDP) my method of evaluating the TPP would be whether or not it could have been expected to lead to per-capita GDP growth (obviously there would be winners and losers, but at least with growth there is a chance for the gain to be larger than the pain).
As an Econ 101 graduate I was vaguely in favor of this deal, though I admit that I didn’t read any of the 5,000 pages. Should I be sad or glad that it is dead?
Any plan this complex (5000 pages!) is mostly a way for the favored to make money on the complexity of compliance.
It is rude to call President Trump the Trumpenfuher. I said it was okay to call him King Donald because you have called past presidents Kings. Let’s show the dear leader some respect.
I thought I sorted this out already: ‘Herr Trumpenfuhrer’ for formal occasions, ‘Das Trumpenfuhrer’ when one is rolling casual.
Back to the original question, didn’t it already? A 5000 page legal document is a lot of billable hours. Never mind all the peeps that supported those august legal minds while they crafted this masterpiece. Isn’t this an ideal state? The wheels of progress turn creating a potential new license Raj, without implementing it and incurring undue regulatory costs. Once that idea is shit-canned, the process begins anew. It’s like a perpetual motion machine for the economy.
These trade deals are about geopolitcs, not actual trade economics. The point of TPP was to keep China from become the unchallenged economic nexus of east asia. It was to get political stakes aligned with the elites in Vietnam and Korea and so forth. And then to ultimately have some more leverage over China.
You don’t need huge documents and hordes of lawyers to do free trade.
I agree with toucan sam. It was funny as a one time joke but getting old quick. The man works his ass off and doing precisely what he promised to people who voted for him. You gotta respect even if you disagree.
presidentpicker,
No I don’t. He’s a New York jerk just like the pair I met on my first day of college. One doesn’t “work his ass off” watching tv and flying around in a gold plated 757.
I agree with toucan sam. Trump should not be called Trumpenfuher. It’s too limiting, ambiguous, and does not convey the big picture of the total man. He should be called “a waste of oxygen that could better be used by bacterial to digest sewage.” Although I admit it’s a wee be cumbersome and not suitable for tweets.
@bobbybobbob: agreed. TPP was a last ditch attempt to hem in China’s influence expansion. It wasn’t great for the US on its surface, but it was more of a defensive move than an offensive one.
The small countries where we once fought hopeless wars are more worried about China today than they about us.
I can’t imagine what Trump thought TPP was about, but I feel reasonably certain his intent wasn’t to jump start China’s regional trade domination plans. Trump is more of a Checkers player than a Chess player; he’s never even heard of Go.
If “Trumpenfuhrer” is a heil too far, how about “Il Donce” (“Il Dunce?”)? Can DJT make the trains run on time?
We’ll have to wait til he starts feeding enemies into meat grinders (feet first) before we can call him “Saddon”. He does already have his “Baghdad Sean”, though. Gotta start somewhere I guess.
“Saddon”?
We will know all is lost when the M-1s roll into Harvard Yard.
The Austrian School folks believe that anything other than unfettered trade represents nothing more than the opportunity to extract rents, which come right off the top of growth in a compounding way. So, if you believe them, no.
bobbybobbob hit the nail on the head. Anybody unable to see that should excuses themselves from the conversation due to clear lack of competence.
> Should I be sad or glad that it is dead?
Glad. Like bobbybobbob and Andrew said, you don’t need a complex ‘agreement’ for free trade and arguably you don’t need an agreement at all. You just trade.
A similar case is offered by Brexit. The antis take satisfaction in observing how the EU will punish Britain for its insolence by imposing tariffs, as if putting rocks in one’s own ports is a good basis for trade.
SuperMike said: “The Austrian School folks believe that anything other than unfettered trade represents nothing more than the opportunity to extract rents, which come right off the top of growth in a compounding way. So, if you believe them, no.”
In general, Austrians will rank trade policies from best to worst: free trade, managed trade, protectionism/merchantilism (pure crony capitalism) and no trade. For Austrians, the TPP is a managed trade agreement and they will view any regulation as something for which constituent corporations lobbied. From their perspective, while managed trade is not preferable to free trade, it is better than outright protectionism or no trade. Of course, since they’re so focused on free markets, usually bad mouth the TPP for not being free trade.
See below:
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2017/01/confusion-about-trump-and-trade-deals.html
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2016/04/free-trade-no-trade-crony-trade-and.html
toucan: Why “Trumpenfuhrer”? You have to understand that among my neighbors and Facebook friends, it is a settled issue that Trump = Hitler. Just as newspapers now report, as though it were a fact, that Trump regularly greets women by “grabbing their pussies” (as far as I know, he used that as a hypothetical example of what American women would allow a TV star to do in order to obtain the benefits of being around a TV star; the credibility of this statement is supported by the fact that American women have gone a lot further in order to get hold of child support cash (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/ChildSupportLitigationWithoutMarriage )).
Here’s just one example from this morning on Facebook: “I’m supposed to feel sorry for Melania? Eva Braun was probably pretty sad too.” The author is a literature professor at NYU. Even if I personally don’t see the parallels, this does seem to reflect how the majority of voters (remember that Clinton did get more votes!) and nearly all journalists think.
Yes Phil, we know what journalist think. These are the same journalist that gave Hillary Clinton a 99% chance of winning the election. Last time you explained “trumpenfuhrer” you said it was to make fun of your neighbors and facebook friends. I know you are smarter than them! I also know that you visit other states and know not everyone agrees with the trumpenfuhrer concept. I think you should stop using it. You can still call him King Donald because you have a long history of using that phrase with other presidents. To keep using the trumpenfuhrer epitaph makes you no better than your silly neighbors or alt left media. Let’s be better than them.
@toucan: not to speak for Phil, but the rhetorical point is: if you take for granted that Trump is evil incarnate, how does one react to development X, which can be viewed in an ambiguous light?
The actually funny thing about it is that it’s wrong and dangerous to assume that Hitler resembles something as recognizable as storybook characters personification of evil.
It makes people very uncomfortable to think about it, but Hitler was not that special. He was a seriously bad guy, as measured by his actions ex post facto — but his situations and circumstances were unique; his personality was not.
Which takes us full circle. If one in a million people have the personality that might take them to similarly evil places as Hitler went…how do you know when you’re looking at the next Hitler?
Certainly a phobic response to people espousing openly hostile-to-others beliefs would be a fair place to start. It’s probably better to avoid a thousand proto-Hitler soundalikes than to indulge a single one of them.
And *that* is the shortcut that Phil’s friends are taking. They know they’re overstating the case, with the same rhetorical justifications that Phil uses. Until the orders start rolling in to IBM and DuPont, we know Hitler will never rise again, just as the next terrorist act against Americans will not superficially resemble Sept 11th.
But you can be a tiny-fractional Hitler (i.e. ovens are cold, internment camps are unlikely) and still be a terrible representative of a decent human being. DJT has some really ugly personality traits, and while we don’t elect Boy Scouts, there is widespread disagreement on how much of his behaviour should be indulged.
Nonsense Andrew! Trump’s own daughter is an orthodox Jew. We are lucky to have Mr. Trump as our president. If anything he has zero ugly personality traits. You better be careful Andrew! Guantanamo is still open for business.
Andrew –
“Certainly a phobic response to people espousing openly hostile-to-others beliefs would be a fair place to start. It’s probably better to avoid a thousand proto-Hitler soundalikes than to indulge a single one of them.”
Do you not see the irony in your ‘hostile-to-others beliefs’ statement? As if the leftist mourners aren’t openly hostile to others beliefs?
@toucan: nonsense. DJT is a thin-skinned, narcissistic bully, and a habitual liar. In many peoples’ minds, that’s automatic disqualification from “decent person” status. Whether his policies might have social or economic value (and for whom) is a separate discussion.
If I’m a candidate for GTMO for saying the above, then America is already finished, done, and the terrorists have won. Good job. I’ll go willingly.
His daughter’s relationship to Judaism is irrelevant. Again, Hitler was nothing special — he was just western, white, and recent. The next charismatic jingoistic populist reactionary isolationist leader probably won’t find it useful to focus on Jews specifically. And hopefully he won’t be as murderous or surrounded by crazy murderous comrades.
@sam: right, that’s the age-old tension. “We tolerate all except the intolerant.” There’s actually a reasonable argument buried in there, but if you feel that your beliefs are diminished or disregarded, it’s insulting to have the importance of tolerance preached at you.
Liberals are hardly the first or only guilty parties there, though. There are decent people on both sides of that political fence.
For what it’s worth, I stand with none of the above. I’d be a libertarian (and was, twenty years ago, a registered Libertarian in MA, which had an active party). But the label only has meaning as others perceive it. The word has been defined out from under me, so it has ceased to be useful.
I don’t believe that Trump has anything of value to offer the country or the world, but I am happy for one thing: Hillary would have put the country back to sleep for another generation. Trump is an inflection point, I think and hope. I’m optimistic enough to believe that there’s a chance for something better to arise from the rubble of the status quo. Historically and globally, that’s rarely true. But if American exceptionalism is good for anything, now is the time for it to shine.
Andrew: I’m not sure how you diagnosed Donald Trump with narcissism, unless you spend a lot of time with him off-camera, but if it is true it might be for the best. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism#Acquired_situational_narcissism for how any person who becomes President of the U.S. is likely to acquire narcissism. If Trump already has it then at least he won’t change too much and will still be the same person that his supporters voted for.
Dean “$8T housing bubble” Baker claimed that the TPP cannot help growth because there are no tariffs to substantially reduce between its parties anymore, and what it does do is corporate welfare, such as the ISDS court system. Baker is on the left (I’m guessing a Bernie voter like yourself!) and in general would not be inclined to attack any policy by Obama just for the sake of it; he also seems to me (NOT an Econ 101 graduate…) like a much more sensible economist than the average. With that in mind I guess I sort of trust him on this one.
@philg: if that is true, would it be appropriate to invoke term limitations early, on account of a prematurely decayed sense of responsibility to others?
DSM-5 says: http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/basics/symptoms/CON-20025568
I am but a lay person, with nothing but an undergrad class or two of psych. Perhaps there are terms of art in there that have unexpected meanings.
David Brooks claims TPP was worth 0.5% of GDP.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/the-politics-of-cowardice.html?_r=0
0.5% boost in a best-case scenario? That does sound useful, but note that government policy regarding alimony, custody, and child support shrink our GDP by about 3% (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/InOurEconomy ) and a lot of folks seem to think that the shrinkage is worth it (because, e.g., it enables single parents and those married to someone with higher income to have more leisure time). Maybe the answer here is that there are people who think that preserving manufacturing jobs in the U.S. is worth giving up 0.5%.
>Maybe the answer here is that there
>are people who think that preserving
>manufacturing jobs in the U.S. is worth
>giving up 0.5%.
This begs the question that giving up TPP will preserve manufacturing jobs in the U.S.