Reciprocity Is the Method to Trump’s Madness - victor Davis Hanson

what had become abnormal was branded the new normal of the post-war world.

Again, a rich and powerful U.S. was supposed to subsidize world trade, take in more immigrants than all the nations of the world combined, protect the West, and ensure safe global communications, travel, and commerce.

After 70 years, the effort had hollowed out the interior of America, creating two separate nations of coastal winners and heartland losers.


Trump’s entire foreign policy can be summed up as a demand for symmetry from all partners and allies, and tit-for-tat replies to would-be enemies.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FREE TRADE?

The Wall street Journal published a very long article with lots of graphs and pictures bemoaning the end of free trade.

Nine years after the financial crisis, global trade is barely growing when compared with overall economic output. Cross-border bank lending is down sharply, as are international capital flows. Immigration in the U.S. and Western Europe faces a deepening public backlash.

Nationalist politicians are on the ascent. On Wednesday, the U.K. formally started proceedings to remove itself from the European Union. In the U.S., President Donald Trump pulled out of a Pacific trade pact on his first working day in the Oval Office, declaring, “Great thing for the American worker, what we just did.”

For traditional economists, globalization is a pathway to prosperity. Rooted in the works of Adam Smith in 1776 and David Ricardo in 1817, the classical canon has embraced the idea that trade is the basis of wealth, because it makes nations more efficient by allowing each to specialize at what its workers do best.

Few of them fully grasped globalization’s downsides in a modern economy. Tying together disparate nations economically also expanded the labor pool globally, pitting workers in wealthy nations against poorly paid ones in developing nations. That greatly boosted the fortunes of the world’s poor, but also created a backlash in the U.S. and Europe. At the same time, freeing financial flows led to debilitating financial excesses that ended in crisis.

Well, yes.  All of this was predictable, but the free traders were enthralled by their ideology and were blind to the real-world effect of their policies.  Free trade is like a drug, great in the correct dosage but when you overdose, you die.

My goodness, that’s a long winded way of blowing smoke. As we end, they note:

In the U.S., wages and salaries of workers rose 2% a year in the past five years. That’s down from 2.9% in the five years before the crisis.

Who has been in charge during the last five years and what has been the policy? The Obama administration has been busy working on globalization; lowering trade barriers, and the result is …. what? Tens of thousands of American factories closed and ninety million working age Americans permanently sidelined, not even looking for work anymore.

And then there’s this:

“Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very, very wealthy,” Mr. Trump said last June at a Rust Belt stop in Pennsylvania, “but it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.”

Haven’t I been reading about this in this very newspaper? The rise in early death; the drug epidemic among the poor out-of-work men and women. The shuttered main streets of flyover America. And the WSJ wonders why working men and women around the world don’t love the free-trading ruling class any more.

Death rates among white middle-aged Americans have soared 'due to the decline in factory jobs and laid off workers turning to drugs or alcohol or committing suicide'

Free trade is literally killing middle-age white men.

Increasing competition with China for trade has been blamed for soaring death rates among white, middle aged Americans.

A silent 'epidemic' of deaths from suicides, drug and alcohol poisoning within that faction was first highlighted last year.

But scientists were baffled as to why white, middle aged Americans were bucking the national trend of decreasing death rates. Now two economists believe they have found the answer.

Justin Pierce and Peter Schott believe they can trace back the uptick in suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related deaths to 2000, when President Bill Clinton decided to relax the rules on major imports....

American factories, which couldn't compete with China's cheap labor force, shut down in droves, while thousands upon thousands of middle-aged white Americans, without college degrees, were laid off.

Unable to cope, many turned to drugs, alcohol or even took their own lives, according to the research....

The surge in deaths amidst white, middle aged Americans was so significant that Dr Anne Case and Dr Angus Deaton, of Princeton University, compared the 'silent' epidemic to the Aids epidemic in the US.

Case and Deaton were the first to highlight the worrying increase in mortality rates last year in separate research.

Between 1978 and 1998, the study reveals the mortality rate for US whites aged 45 to 54 fell by an average of two per cent each year. This was reflected in other rich countries, including France, Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Sweden.

After 1998, these nations saw mortality rates for this group steadily continue to fall, by two per cent every year.

But, in the US, mortality rates rose by half a per cent a year.

The authors wrote: 'No other rich country saw a similar turnaround.'

They estimate that had the white mortality in the US rate held at its 1998 value, 96,000 lives would have been saved between 1998 and 2013.

And had it continued to fall as it had between 1978 and 1998, 488,500 deaths would have been avoided from 1999 to 2013.

This figure is comparable to the number of deaths caused by the Aids epidemic in the US.

While death rates related to drugs, alcohol and suicides have risen for middle-aged whites across the board, the largest surge are seen among those with the least education.

For those with a high school degree or less, deaths caused by drug and alcohol poisoning rose four fold, suicides increased by 81 per cent, and deaths caused by liver disease and cirrhosis jumped 50 per cent.

All-cause mortality rose by 22 per cent for this least-educated group.

Among those with some college education, researchers noted little change in overall death rates.

While among those people who achieved a bachelor's degree or higher, death rates fell.

A rise in suicide and drug overdoses in midlife, is a recognised trend across the world.

However, the authors note 'that these upward trends were persistent and large enough to drive up all-cause midlife mortality, has, to our knowledge been overlooked'.

DRUDGE on trade deal

Obamatrade resurrected by Republicans...

Could encompass up to 90% of world GDP... 

SESSIONS: 'Members did not know that when they voted'...

SCHLAFLY: Creates 'global governance superstructure'...

HANNITY: 'Selling Out American Sovereignty'... 

House Conservatives Put Boehner on Notice...

Ryan talking point debunked -- by Australian Trade Minister...

Based on Obama's history of negotiating with foreign governments we lack any confidence on his ability to forge a deal that's good for America.  There is no reason why this cannot wait until after he leaves office.