Thoughts On The President's Trade Agenda

Last week I offered my thoughts about why Members of Congress should proudly work with the President in his final three years to pass his ambitious trade agenda, extending our reach throughout Asia, Latin America and Europe.  While there have been some bumps in that process this week, I still remain optimistic that the President will be able leave office having completed both TPP and TTIP, as they are called. 

But to do so we are learning a few things.  The President will have to continue to sell his broader economic agenda with vigor to the American people, giving them a strong belief that he has a plan that can make their lives better in this new age of globalization.  He will have to find a way to work with Congress to provide more consultation and transparency in the fashioning of these and future trade agreements.  And USTR will have to demonstrate, through the agreements themselves, that we are indeed modernizing our approach to trade, raising standards and making our global system better and more responsive to the realities of the world as it is today. 

As I wrote in my piece, the geopolitical case for these agreements, and for the President's desire to strenghten the liberal international order in a time of great transformation, are compelling.   But to get these done in the next three years, the White House and its allies have an awful lot of work to do.  We at NDN welcome this debate as I think we have a good argument to make, and the issues at play here are perhaps the most important the Obama Administration will be involved in over the next three years.  But this will be a long process, a complicated one, and those who agree with us need to take this time and get very serious about marshalling our arguments and making our case over years, not just days, weeks and months.

One word of caution to my fellow advocates for the President’s trade agenda.  2014 isn’t the 1990s.  We are attempting to sell these far reaching arrangements not during a period of extraordinary growth, when median incomes went up more than $8,000 a family.  Workers today haven’t received a raise in 14 years, and have become far more skeptical that technology advances and globalization have been good for them and their families.  Way back in 2005 Rob Shapiro, current Rep. Joe Garcia and I wrote a landmark paper arguing that to continue to keep domestic support for global economic liberalization at 1990s levels, we need to do far more for workers and their families.  The President’s economic agenda this year, coupled with previous actions like health care reform, are the kinds of things we will need to enact if we are to pass these trade agreements with broad support from the American people. 

One area that we advocates also have to confront is the remarkable decline in public investment the US has seen in recent years.  At a time when we have the largest school-age population in US history moving through our schools, and global competition is more virulent than it has ever been, we are lowering our level of public investment, exactly the wrong response to what the American people need.  Public investment is half of what it was in the 1960s, and lower than it has been since the late 1940s.  One doesn’t have to have a PhD to know what happens if this trend continues – it is a guarantor of national decline for the United States.  See the graph below. 

We are already seeing warning signs about our competitive position which should be alarming policy makers.  The most recently released PISA study of adult skills from the OECD documents that our workers and students are falling far behind the rest of the developed world.  Even among a measure one would assume we would lead – problem solving in a technology dense environment for 16 to 24 year olds – the US is dead last in the OECD.  Dead last.  (see p93 here).

So we at NDN are saddling up for a three-year effort to make the case that needs to be made about the President’s trade agenda.  But we advocates will have to approach this effort in far different ways than we did in the 1990s.  More must be done, by both parties, for the American people themselves or we should not expect this effort to be easy, or successful.