By The Herald Editorial Board
If a far-reaching trade agreement among the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim nations is going to be completed, it’s best chance now depends on President Obama and the current Congress during a lame-duck session after the November elections.
Both major party candidates have made their opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership clear.
Republican Party nominee Donald Trump flatters himself that he’ll renegotiate — alone, no doubt — new trade deals, work that began more than a decade ago and resulted in an agreement that is more than 5,000 pages in length, and he’ll do so with countries that are not eager to open up talks yet again.
Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton, who favored the basics of the partnership while secretary of state, has painted herself into a corner by opposing TPP in exchange for the approval of supporters in Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ camp. Resuming her support for the trade deal now or as president risks further criticism regarding her trustworthiness.
But it would be a mistake to assume overwhelming and bipartisan opposition to the trade pact based on the anti-TPP signs that bobbed on a sea of delegates at the Democratic National Convention last week in Philadelphia and cheers for Trump’s empty and unexplained promises to bring back manufacturing jobs.
The opposite appears to be the case. A NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released last month found that 55 percent of American voters favor free trade with foreign countries. Looking at support among parties, 60 percent of Democratic voters support free trade, as do 54 percent of independents and 51 percent of Republicans.
Among a majority of Americans there’s an understanding that free trade is good for the county because the U.S. relies on its place in the global economy. And the Trans-Pacific Partnership would improve the nation’s standing in that global economy by reducing tariffs while offering protections for labor, health and the environment worldwide. The other nations, in signing on to the TPP, have had to agree to protections for workers, wildlife conservation, the availability of medicines, the free flow of information on the internet, online commerce and intellectual property.
In Singapore earlier this week, President Obama defended the TPP and said he would seek its ratification in Congress before he leaves office. He told a Singapore newspaper: “The answer isn’t to turn inward and embrace protectionism. We can’t just walk away from free trade. In a global economy where our economies and supply chains are deeply integrated, it’s not even possible.”
Scuttling TPP could lead to higher U.S. tariffs on foreign imports, increasing costs not only for consumers but for U.S. manufacturers who import materials. Retaliatory tariffs by foreign countries would then hurt exports of U.S.-made goods and services.
Washington state offers a convincing example of how the rest of the U.S. can benefit from improved trade agreements by increasing employment that relies on that global exchange.
The state Department of Commerce reports that 1 in 3 jobs in the state are directly or indirectly tied to trade and that exports from the state topped $86.3 billion in 2015. A study commissioned by the Washington Council on International Trade found that 421,000 jobs across the state were directly supported by trade in 2014. Many of those jobs, 71,220, are at Boeing and other aerospace companies, but aerospace accounts for only 17 percent of the total. At the same time, 14 percent of those trade-dependent jobs are union jobs.
TPP detractors on the left and right blame free trade agreements for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs. And while manufacturing jobs have been lost to overseas factories, increases in productivity and automation technology have also contributed to the loss of those jobs.
What the U.S. has lost in manufacturing work, it has begun to replace, particularly in Washington and California with jobs in the software industry, for example. The state’s software industry provides nearly 6 percent of the jobs directly tied to trade.
The U.S. International Trade Commission has said the TPP would have an overall positive impact on the U.S. economy creating an estimated 128,000 jobs and adding $43 billion to the economy over the next 15 years. The state trade council says that had TPP been ratified last year, Washington state could have added as much as $8.7 billion in exports and created as many as 26,400 new jobs.
Killing the TPP won’t bring manufacturing jobs back. But without the TPP and other trade agreements, the U.S. has little hope of replacing them.
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