Developed economies face huge problems that have produced this season of rage. But the world has enjoyed growing prosperity over decades because of continuously reduced trade barriers. A reversal would be the road to conflict. Like the best trade accords, the Trans-Pacific Partnership is also a strategic boost to liberty and stability in the fastest-growing part of the globe. Congress should resist populist ranting and ratify it.
How Hillary Loses
Donald Trump can actually win if Clinton makes these four mistakes. Spoiler alert: She’s already making all of them.
.. If you drill down enough, it’s clear there are at least four paths to a loss, and any one of them poses a real risk for a candidate likely to follow her usual careful, calculating playbook.
.. Step 1: Take Hispanic enthusiasm for granted
.. Yes, their numbers are growing. But Hispanics simply don’t like Clinton nearly as much as they like Obama
.. Step 2: Alienate the young
.. Step 3: Let establishment Republicans find another place to go
.. Step 4: Fumble on trade
.. Polls show that union households tend to oppose free trade quite strongly. Sanders has made free trade a centerpiece of his primary campaign against Clinton. Trump, hoping to woo Sanders voters, frequently praises his position on that issue.
We’ve Seen the Trump Phenomenon Before
Mr. Trump perhaps can be best understood as the face of a broader global dynamic: the resistance to policies that encourage global competition and open borders to people who have lived too long on the losing side.
.. Expanded trade and immigration put pressure on the jobs and wages of the working class, yet they also served to deliver enormous wealth and enhanced power into the hands of a tiny elite. In the absence of actions to mitigate the damage and more broadly share the bounty of globalization, it’s no surprise that righteous anger against the establishment has opened the door to unorthodox political entrepreneurs.
.. “The middle class allows for both democracy and stability,” he writes. Middle-class people “tend to eschew extremism of both the left and the right.” Workers who feel themselves losing their perch in the middle class may be the most vulnerable of all to a populist appeal.
.. Mr. Trump may seem unusual to Americans because the United States did not produce the kind of autocratic populist leaders Europe offered the 20th century, men who built power bases blaming others for their ills: immigrants, Jews, foreigners in general.
.. rising inequality in the United States led not to populism but to what he calls a “plutocratic” equilibrium, where elites purchase political power while the poor are systematically excluded and the working class is encouraged to support the status quo based on issues like gun control and gay marriage.
.. It’s possible the United States will soon by governed by a president who rode into office partly by appealing to popular resentment against China, a country where overt nationalism is a central plank of the government’s claim to authority. What would happen if an incident in the South China Sea ended with 200 dead American sailors?
How the iPhone widens the US trade deficit with China
An interesting hypothetical scenario is one where Apple had all iPhones assembled in the US. Assuming that the wage of American workers is ten times as high as those of their Chinese counterparts, the total assembly cost would rise to $68 and total manufacturing cost would be pushed to approximately $240. Selling iPhones assembled by American workers at $500 per unit would still leave a 50% profit margin for Apple.