President Bill Clinton starting things rolling with NAFTA….
President Barack Obama continued with it….
Global trade barriers dropped for American’s to receive cheaper prices on goods….
Great!….
But?
The downside is the with America ‘s higher pay level’s?
Manufacturing has left America in a rush….
Donald Trump’s trade war IS unpopular in the media and to Americans’s who are fearful of higher prices….
But?
We Americans do NOT want higher prices ….
This plays into China’s efforts to pull itself into first place as a economy ahead of America….
All the above has worried American workers since Clinton….
And is underneath the headlines a problem for Democrats who have American consumers support on one hand?….But Union annoyance at job loses on the other hand…..
The party is split along familiar lines, with progressives like Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont calling for a more radical transformation of trade policy, and moderates like former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. espousing a more traditional approach.
That division is exposing a vulnerability for a party that has historically embraced a tougher stance on free trade than Republicans but has seen that position erode with the ascension of moderate Democrats like Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama.
Progressives who had railed against trade pacts for years felt shunted aside in the Clinton administration, as pro-trade Democrats brought China into the World Trade Organization and finished NAFTA, a trade deal begun by President George Bush. They felt similarly ignored by the Obama administration, which pushed ahead with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a multicountry trade pact, despite complaints that the deal was a boon to drug companies, would allow foreign automakers to flood the American market and overlooked labor violations in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia.
Then came Mr. Trump, whose assaults on China and the North American Free Trade Agreement during the 2016 campaign mimicked what many Democrats had been saying. His promises to put “America first” won over some of the union rank and file, if not their leaders.
“At one time, the Democrats were much more aggressive on trade than the Republicans,” said Daniel DiMicco, President Trump’s trade adviser during the 2016 campaign, who leads the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a trade group. “They’ve been missing for decades on this, just as many of the Republicans had.”
For now, many of the Democratic candidates are characterizing Mr. Trump’s trade policy as haphazard and inept. But some have also praised him for pursuing policies they have backed for years….
image….Bridget Bennett for The New York Times