Democrats often pillory Republicans for their economic errors. From the 1930s on, they reminded Americans of Herbert Hoover's Great Depression. In 1960, they blamed Dwight Eisenhower for slow growth. In the 1980s, they decried the "trickle-down" policies of Ronald Reagan. And today, they excoriate the damage caused by the North American Free Trade Agreement passed under ... Bill Clinton.
Even Sen. Hillary Clinton treats the accord with a warmth she normally reserves for Kenneth W. Starr. She never misses a chance to denounce what she calls "the shortcomings of NAFTA" or to insist she was always against it. But she has to deal with Sen. Barack Obama, who often gives the impression that his opponent's name is Hillary Nafta Clinton.
So Tuesday's debate in Cleveland devoted a lot of time to the question: Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of NAFTA? Both candidates denied any complicity, past or present, and both vowed to scrap the treaty if the Mexican government doesn't agree to changes.
Mr. Obama makes a special theme of blaming this and other trade agreements for setting off a race to the bottom that destroys American jobs. "In Youngstown, Ohio," he said in a Texas debate, "I've talked to workers who have seen their plants shipped overseas as a consequence of bad trade deals like NAFTA, literally seeing equipment unbolted from the floors of factories and shipped to China." Why NAFTA would induce a company to move production to China is a puzzle, but you get the idea.
His campaign claims a million jobs have vanished because of the deal. That sounds devastating, but over the last 14 years, the American economy has added a net total of 25 million jobs - some of them, incidentally, attributable to expanded trade with Mexico. When NAFTA took effect in 1994, the unemployment rate was 6.7 percent. Today it's 4.9 percent.
But maybe all the jobs we lost were good ones, and all the new ones are minimum-wage positions sweeping out abandoned factories? Actually, no. According to data compiled by Harvard economist Robert Z. Lawrence, the average blue-collar worker's wages and benefits, adjusted for inflation, have risen by 11 percent under NAFTA. Instead of driving pay scales down, it appears to have pulled them up.
Manufacturing employment has declined, but not because we're producing less: Manufacturing output has expanded far faster than it did in the decade before NAFTA. The problem is that as productivity rises, we can make more stuff with fewer people. That's essentially the definition of economic progress.
