CAFTA
Quick, what countries would CAFTA create a free trade agreement with? I can’t tell you either without looking it up.* I know the legislation for this passed the Senate last week and will be taken up by the House sometime this month, but that’s about it. For a fairly significant piece of legislation, it’s been pretty much invisible from the public political discussion, at least from where I sit. It’s a perfect example of the phenomenon discussed in this week’s CQ cover story (login required) — an issue that is of critical importance to interest groups, and of little interest to the vast majority of Americans.
I tend to fall in the squishy middle on free-trade. Fundamentally, I don’t think it’s either feasible or desirable to slam the door on globalization. Free-trade agreements matter a lot on the margins, but aren’t going to affect the major overall trends; for example, whether or not we pass free trade agreements, there’s not going to be a textile industry in the US. I accept the argument that trade promotes overall growth — but there are clearly winners and losers, and I’m much more inclined to worry about those distributional impacts, which mainstream economists often airily dismiss as "short-term transitional issues." But I also don’t think it makes programatic sense (v. political sense) to set up special programs for workers dislocated by free trade as opposed to workers who are unemployed for any other reason.
One of the ways that I figure out where I stand on legislation when I don’t have the time or interest to delve into the details is to look at who is supporting it and opposing it. (This method isn’t perfect — even Rick Santorum supports some legislation that I like — but it works reasonably well most of the time.) Probably the best thing that can be said for CAFTA is that it makes the US sugar cartel scream — and anything that pisses them off can’t be entirely bad. Unions despise CAFTA, of course; unions have worried about free trade displacing jobs at least as far back as the early 19th century. (I wrote my undergraduate thesis about two 19th century labor activists, and it was amazing how modern their concerns sounded.)
I hadn’t realized until I read this article in today’s Washington Post how partisan of an issue CAFTA has become — they predict that it will get less than 10 Democratic votes in the House, versus the 102 votes that NAFTA got 12 years ago. There are a lot of historically free-trade Democrats who are opposing it because it has even less in the way of worker protections than past free-trade agreements and because the Bush Administration cut them out of the negotiations completely, making it a "take it or leave it" deal. At the same time, some Democratic leaders whom I respect — including Jimmy Carter, Donna Shalala, and Henry Cisneros — are supporting it.
*Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
July 7th, 2005 at 11:19 am
I absolutely cannot wait to see what the vote total will be. I think more than anything Democrats just want to see CAFTA fail because it’s one of Bush’s biggies, so to speak. I even think that if the Democrats smash this legislation to the ground -– which is expected — it will have even bigger repercussions for them in the upcoming presidential election.
July 7th, 2005 at 4:43 pm
Jennifer, I’d love to hear more about what repercussions you think there will be. I don’t think CAFTA is on the radar screen for most voters, but the Post article suggests it could mean business cutting off donations to the Dems.
July 8th, 2005 at 9:05 am
CAFTA certainly isn’t on the minds of average voters, but politicians are surely keeping score.
In the upcoming election when economic issues come to the fore and Democrats do not pass this legislation, then it can definitely be used against them, especially since Carter is one of the CAFTA supporters. Carter — in all his sage wisdom — believes in free trade with Central America, so why not the entire Democratic party? (This can be an argument used by the Republicans).
All of the Central American presidents even want CAFTA for their own economies and workers. So, I see potential for the Rep. party to twist things and in three years paint this particular episode as yet another example of partisan politics.
Some in the Rep. party have even likened a vote against CAFTA as a vote for China. Some textile manufacturers here in North Carolina are in total agreement with this stand, believing that joining with CAFTA countries is the only way to keep Chinese textile imports at bay.
The Rep. party is also very concerned about ensuring these countries — which are so close to us — are kept democratic and pose little threat to our national security. Further, it can be argued, by growing the economies of these Central American countries it keeps more of their citizens at home and not here in America as illegal aliens taking even more jobs. It’s a stretch, but a savvy politician can make it fly.
The numbers of American job loss and employment gains have always been debatable, especially in relation to NAFTA. I believe in the upcoming election the Republicans have a leg up on convincing the public that CAFTA is or was good for America.
I would love to know what Clinton thinks about CAFTA.