President Obama, Majority Leader McConnell, and Speaker Boehner are right–many Americans will benefit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The consumers will get slightly lower prices at Wal-Mart. The C.E.O.s of companies that can move factories overseas should do well. The stockholders will do ok. The lawyers who write the agreements and the Congress members who rake in the contributions will do fine.
Beth Macy, who has written about furniture manufacturing in the U.S., points out who won’t do so well. Today there are more American workers on disability (8.9 million) than on assembly lines (8.6 million). As for federally-funded job retraining, most retrained workers are in lower paying service industries. And how about this for a factoid: 63,300 American factories closed between 2001 and 2013.
If you’d like to read Ms. Macy’s full essay, here’s the link. <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/opinion/whos-speaking-up-for-the-american-worker.html?emc=edit_th_20150625&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=56275497&_r=0>.
I suppose I should be writing a celebratory post on the Court’s approval of the Affordable Care Act. It was a victory, but we still have millions of people with no health care, higher infant mortality rates and lower life expectancies than most industrialized countries, and Republicans committed to ending the law rather than fixing it. I have a hard time celebrating.
This whole thing with the TPP makes me ill. So the SCOTUS ruling will hopefully help all of the people who lose their jobs to the Pacific rim countries get insurance. It's a crummy trade off if you ask me. The vast majority of people would rather have a job to support their family.
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