March 17, 2016
Thomas Friedman once again stumbled into trade policy, telling us that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is exactly the sort of trade deal that tough negotiator Donald Trump would have gotten. Unfortunately, he gets some of the big things badly wrong.
First, he would have us believe that the TPP is a really good deal for the U.S. because the tariffs that we eliminate on imports are mostly small, whereas the tariffs other countries will eliminate on our exports are in some cases very large. He cites Vietnam’s “peak tariffs of over 50 percent on cars and machines” and refers to over 18,000 foreign tariffs that will be eliminated as a result of the TPP.
While it might be good if Vietnam eliminated its tariffs on U.S. cars and machines, it is highly unlikely that the U.S. will ever export any significant number of cars and machines to Vietnam. It is certainly possible that U.S. corporations General Motors and GE will export cars and machines (???) to Vietnam, but these products will almost certainly be produced in other Asian countries. That might be good for the bottom lines of General Motors and GE, but not especially good news for workers in the United States.
The 18,000 tariffs are a joke line that the Obama administration came up with for ill-informed members of Congress and pundits. As Public Citizen points out, the U.S. exports in less than half of these 18,000 categories and in most of the others the volume of exports is trivial. Among the 18,000 tariffs on the Obama administration’s list are Malaysia’s shark fin tariffs, Vietnam’s whale meat tariffs, and Japan’s ivory tariffs. (Would Donald Trump really spend time negotiating the removal of these tariffs?)
But the really good part is when Friedman told readers about how the TPP gets tough on enforcing intellectual property rules for U.S. corporations:
“He certainly would have insisted on strong intellectual property protections for America’s software industry, one of our greatest export assets, and taken an approach to pharmaceuticals that splits the difference between what the big drug companies want in the way of intellectual property protection time for their products and what the generic manufacturers want.”
Getting more money for Microsoft and Merck is of course good news for shareholders of Microsoft and Merck, but it’s bad news for the rest of us. As the Peterson Institute’s new study of the impact of the TPP pointed out:
“The model assumes that the TPP will affect neither total employment nor the national savings (or equivalently trade balances) of countries.”
If the trade balance of the United States does not change, and we get more money for Microsoft’s software and Merck’s drugs, then we must get less money for everything else. It is hard to see why most people would be celebrating a rise in the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods and other items that is offset by higher royalty and patent fees for our software and drug companies.
It is also really neat how Freidman, who spends much time wringing his hands over rising inequality, is touting a deal which is explicitly designed to raise inequality. The sort of longer and stronger patent protection in the TPP means more money for stockholders and highly educated workers at the expense of everyone else. A simple way to combat inequality is to stop making trade deals that redistribute income upward.
Friedman also touts the sort of rules on labor rights and other issues that have proven almost completely ineffective in trade deals with Mexico, Colombia (where they still kill labor organizers), and other countries, but this is enough fun for one night.
Comments