The Wall Street Journal had a good opinion piece on NAFTA the other day I didn't get around to mentioning.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1208...googlenews_wsj
Quote:
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What the antitrade advocates have been hiding from the candidates (or maybe don't know themselves) is that almost all of the increase in our Nafta deficit since 2000 has been in increased U.S. imports of energy from Canada and Mexico. In fact, $58 billion of the $62 billion increase in our Nafta deficit has been in energy imports. That's 95% of the total increase.
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Quote:
Except for energy, though, our trade deficit within Nafta has hardly grown at all – only $3.5 billion from 2000-2007. Our agricultural and manufactured goods sales to Nafta countries have just about kept pace with our imports. That's a lot more than one can say about the rest of our foreign trade.
While the nonenergy deficit within Nafta has grown less than $4 billion since the job loss started, with the rest of the world it grew over $150 billion. Put another way, the increase in our nonenergy deficit within Nafta has accounted for only 2% of the increase in our global nonenergy deficit since 2000.
Why are the candidates so focused on 2% of our trade problem rather than on the other 98%? Our nonenergy deficit with the high-wage, high-environmental-standard European Union (with whom we have no free trade agreement) grew 10 times as much as it did with Nafta. And of course, with China the deficit grew even more.
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With the article pointing all of this out, I am going to take a moment to also remind everyone exactly where we get our oil from as it puts it all into perspective, as well as other things.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/p...nt/import.html
Top 5 importers:
CANADA
SAUDI ARABIA
MEXICO
NIGERIA
VENEZUELA
04-23-2008, 01:15 PM
NAFTA and the numbers
