April 13, 2016
The Obama administration is starting its full court press to get Congress to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yesterday, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech in support of the pact according to the Washington Post.
According to the Post, in his speech blamed technology rather than trade for eliminating jobs in manufacturing. It is easy to show that this is mistaken. The number of jobs in manufacturing was little changed, apart from cyclical fluctuations from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. From the late 1990s to 2006 we lost more than 3.5 million manufacturing jobs, almost 20 percent of employment in the sector, as the trade deficit exploded.
Manufacturing Employment
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
There had been large gains in productivity due to technology throughout this period. It was only when the trade deficit soared from just over 1.0 percent of GDP in 1996 to almost 6.0 percent of GDP in 2005 that we saw massive job loss in manufacturing. It would have been helpful if the Washington Post had corrected Mr. Kerry’s misstatement, as it might have done for other public figures, like Senator Bernie Sanders.
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