It looks like the major media outlets are doing their full court press to lay the groundwork for the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). In recent weeks the news and opinion pages have been filled with articles and columns on the wonders of trade and why all good people should support trade deals like the TPP.
In fact, some of what these pieces say about the wonders of trade is true, there can be large benefits to countries from trading and there is no doubt that the United States is enormously richer as a result of international trade. But that hardly means that everyone was benefitted by the patterns of trade over the last three decades, nor is it a reason to support the TPP.
But let’s be positive about trade. It is possible to envision a different pattern of trade which will offer benefits for the bulk of the population of the United States and also for our trading partners in the developing world.
Let’s start with my favorite area in which to expand trade, highly-paid professionals. Our doctors and dentists, and to a lesser extent our lawyers, make far more than their counterparts in other wealthy countries. This is not the case for our autoworkers and steel workers. They earn considerably lower pay than their counterparts in Western Europe.
We can correct this imbalance by removing the barriers that make it difficult for foreign professionals to practice in the United States...
From that point forward developing countries like China and Vietnam ran enormous trade surpluses. This implied huge trade deficits and unemployment for manufacturing workers in the United States and to a lesser extent Europe. The U.S. trade deficit eventually peaked at almost 6 percent of GDP in 2005, the equivalent of a deficit of $1080 billion in today's economy. This trade deficit led to the loss of close to one-third of all jobs in manufacturing.
So Cohen is giving us this impressive display of hand-wringing, telling us that it is unfortunate that rich country workers had to get whacked, but it was necessary to allow for the poor in the developing world to improve their living standards. It's very touching, but in the standard economics, it was hardly necessary.
The standard economics would have allowed the pattern of growth of the early and mid-1990s to continue. In that story, rich country workers would still have their jobs. Instead of producing goods for people in rich countries, people in poor countries would produce goods and services for their own populations. This should have allowed for even more rapid gains in living standards.
The fact that the textbook course of development was reversed, with massive capital flows going from poor countries to rich countries, was due to a massive failure of the international financial system. Workers in rich countries did not suffer from any inevitable process that allowed the world's poor to improve their living standards, they suffered because of the ineptitude and corruption of the folks at the Clinton Treasury Department and the I.M.F.
The call to break up the banks is not some socialist clarion call to end capitalism. (Well, it might be from Bernie, but not from everyone.)
In fact, it's just the opposite. The lessons of the crash era are that these megabanks have grown beyond the organic controls of capitalism. They were so big and so systemically important in '08 that the government could not let them go out of business.
This alone was an argument for breaking them up. The banks emerged from '08 with the implicit backing of the federal government. They became quasi-state entities, almost immune to failure. Not just Bernie Sanders worried about this. Voices as diverse as Louisiana Republican David Vitter and Krugman's own New York Times editorial board have argued for hard caps on bank size.
What's happened in more recent years, with LIBOR and the money-laundering scandals and Forex and the London Whale episode and so on, is that these firms also proved too "systemically important" to regulate and prosecute. They grew too big not only for capitalism, but for criminal law.
When a company is not only too big to fail, but too big to prosecute, it's too big to exist. Krugman may believe otherwise, but he shouldn't pretend that others – including his own paper – don't have legitimate concerns.
The Burr/Feinstein draft text may in fact be so bad for privacy that it’s good for privacy: Privacy advocates point out that it has almost zero likelihood of making it into law in its current form. The White House has already declined to publicly support the bill.
For more than thirty years, Egypt was an anchor of stability and a reliable American partner in regional security. From the time Sadat expelled Soviet advisers and broached peace with Israel, ties with Egypt have been a core pillar of American Middle East policy. But, as my colleague Steven Cook presciently noted way back in February 2012, Egypt’s revolution accelerated the launch of what he calls a “long goodbye” between these two formerly indispensable partners. He argued back then that shifting from a “special relationship” to something more transaction would have four concrete benefits for Washington: ...
Moreover, since his accession to power (first in a military coup in July 2013 and then in a highly constrained election in 2014), President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has made decisions that are undermining both Egypt’s domestic stability and key American policy goals in the region.
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To top it all off, the Egyptian government continues to throw obstacles in the road of U.S.-Egyptian cooperation. Its military resists learning from the hard-won American experience in effective counterinsurgency. Its leadership has resolutely refused to allow core bilateral aid programs, like those supporting higher education, to move forward. And at the same time, the Egyptian government continues to promote conspiracy theories about the United States to its public through media smears and showtrials, and now, apparently, to its newly elected parliamentarians.
The proximate cause of these long lines in urban, student-heavy areas is the state’s new voter identification law backed by the Republican legislature and Gov. Scott Walker. It implements strict new requirements for valid identification that excludes most student IDs (in response, some Wisconsin schools have begun issuing separate identification cards for students to vote) and requires voters without official identification to go through a cumbersome process even if they’ve voted in the past. Writing for the Nation, Ari Berman describes elderly, longtime voters who were blocked from the polls for want of the right papers. “Others blocked from the polls include a man born in a concentration camp in Germany who lost his birth certificate in a fire; a woman who lost use of her hands but could not use her daughter as power of attorney at the DMV; and a 90-year-old veteran of Iwo Jima who could not vote with his veterans ID.”
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If the urgency of the issue wasn’t obvious, Grothman made it plain. Voter ID laws in Wisconsin and beyond are a direct attack on democracy, an attempt to rig the game by blocking whole groups of Americans from the polls. In what appears to be a strong cycle for their party, Democrats should take what happened in Wisconsin as a siren for action. Restoring democracy and protecting it from these attacks should be at the center of the party’s agenda.
San Francisco has become the first city in the United States to require that its companies provide their employees with paid parental leave. A new law, approved by the city's Board of Supervisors to come into force in 2017, mandates that firms over a certain size (with 50 employees at first, dropping to 20 in 2018) give new mothers and fathers six weeks of paid time off. Californian law already guaranteed that 55 percent of wages would be provided by a state disability program, but San Francisco's new rules mean that the remaining 45 percent will be provided by employers, up to a salary ceiling of $106,740 per year.
