As this year’s Democrats’ Primary Race drags on and on, I have to admit that just be osmosis, I’ve become more familiar than I ever hoped to be about the candidates’ positions. And what annoys me the most is their fiscal/trade policies. Why can’t we have a pro-free-trade candidate who is believably committed to balancing our budget?!

Bill Clinton wrote in Between Hope and History, “We don’t need to build walls, we need to build bridges. We don’t need protection, we need opportunity. But in a world of stiff competition we also need more than free trade. We need fair trade with fair rules. That’s why I fought for NAFTA, which effectively opened Mexico’s and Canada’s markets to American products, and for GATT, which is helping to level the playing field for American companies abroad. In all, since 1992 we have negotiated more than 200 trade agreements-21 with Japan alone.” [1]

But now, a decade later, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both threatened to withdraw from The North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA, they say, has cost high-wage jobs in the United States. How is it that it’s the Republicans these days who are the ones trumpeting free trade? Oh, I know, it’s an effort to appeal to the “ordinary American” lower-income worker… the kind of person whose job may be outsourced to China. Wait a minute–to China. And what’s the connection between NAFTA and China?

In October 2007, Bill Clinton said NAFTA had become a “symbol” of US jobs outsourced overseas and the hollowing out of US industries, but America has worse trade deficits with countries such as China and Japan than it does with Mexico.

Obama, in August 07 told the AFL-CIO, “people don’t want a cheaper T-shirt if they’re losing a job in the process. They would rather have the job and pay a little bit more for a T-shirt. And I think that’s something that all Americans could agree to.” But what if people could have cheaper T-shirts and training to learn how to do another job? But in truth, Obama’s comparison leaves something to be desired. The US has been outsourcing its textiles for decades.

After all, the Multi Fibre agreement went into effect in 1974 (expired in 2004). The MFA was enacted to (1) enable developed countries to protect their garment industries even though developing countries have a comparative advantage in the textile industry and (2) to allow developed countries to pick and choose which developing countries to import textiles from through mechanisms like quotas and tariffs. What I’m saying here is not that I’m pro- or against the MFA, but rather that the globalization of garment industry is, in fact, an old problem.

One of the reasons why developing countries can make clothes more cheaply than we can is that it’s generally a low-technology industry that thrives on cheap labor but doesn’t require huge amounts of R&D, capital, or innovation. As an American who cares about the future of my country, I’m more worried about the outsourcing of our high-tech jobs (things like software engineering) and the declining math/science scores of our children. These are the kinds of factors that will determine America’s competitiveness tomorrow — why over-protect our markets today at the cost of our childrens’ future tomorrow?

And about the federal budget, when Senator McCain was asked in April how he plans to balance the budget, he said that he hoped to do so by stimulating economic growth: “I don’t believe in a static economy,’’ Mr. McCain said. “I believe that when there’s stimulus for growth, when there’s opportunity, when people keep more of their money — and the government is the least efficient way to spend your money — that economies improve.’’ But what happens when the US economy as a whole takes a turn south? To me, his commitment to a balanced budget sounds like an empty promise.