Thursday, December 18, 2008

NAFTA Gone Wrong

"NAFTA: An Unprecedented Experiment Gone Wrong"

"NAFTA has made American manufacturing uncompetitive and has caused a large amount of our production facilities to move out of the country. We were promised widespread job creation, it never materialized.

NAFTA's 900 page agreement was a radical experiment that had never before been undertaken. In essence, NAFTA granted foreign investors a new set of privileges allowing them to promote manufacturing to take advantage of Mexico's lower wages, and lower cost of doing business. We loaned Mexico $20 billion to build their nation up, so we would have a country to export our goods to.

Americans were told the Mexican economy would be transformed from the ranks of a developing nation into an economic powerhouse. The growing Mexican economy was supposed to prop up the U.S. by increasing our trade surplus and creating hundreds of thousands of American jobs.

Fourteen years later, NAFTA's idealistic promises have yet to come to fruition. Instead, thousands of our factories have closed up and moved to Mexico to take advantage of their slave labor wages destroying our manufacturing base and slashing American jobs. Since 1993, manufacturing employment in the U.S. has decreased from 16.8 million to 13.9 million. NAFTA has clearly not delivered on the promise of widespread job creation.

Similarly, Mexico did not become a world player buying up American exports. Instead our trade surplus with Mexico deteriorated into a 91 billion deficit and the combined deficit with Canada and Mexico has increased to $190 billion.

NAFTA proponents blindly led the American public into a disastrous experiment that has clearly gone awry. If NATFA is not changed or canceled quickly the only place your children will find a job will be working for a foreign owned company, as all of our companies are moving out of the country.

While campaigning President-elect Barack Obama clamored for "fair trade" over "free trade." Americans need to hold him accountable to his campaign rhetoric by signing the renegotiate NAFTA petition, which urges President-elect Obama to begin renegotiating NAFTA immediately after taking office..."

Click here to Economy In Crisis to read the full article.

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