Yes, empires die by a thousand cuts..... but if you look at the actual data, things just didn't play out in a way that implicates NAFTA. Like over the 20 years
before NAFTA, we were hemorrhaging badly. In 1993, the last year before NAFTA, the poverty rate was 15.1%, which was the highest in a decade, and four full points higher than a generation before! Life was going to crap. And it wasn't just rising poverty. Unemployment rates had been elevated for almost two decades. We didn't have sub-5% unemployment in even a single month between the start of 1974 and when NAFTA was implemented. Not even once in all that time.
That's the context to remember. Things were AWFUL before NAFTA. After NAFTA, poverty rates dropped like a rock, and within a few years unemployment rates went under 4% (and went under it again and again in the following years -- in 2000, 2007, 2018, and now.
I know people are desperate to blame our problems on NAFTA, but the FACT is that things were getting worse before NAFTA and have gotten better since NAFTA. Those facts are stubborn things.
Again, there's a huge desire to blame NAFTA for such things, but the stats don't support that. At the end of 1993, right before NAFTA was implemented, the home ownership rate was 64.6%. That was DOWN from a pre-NAFTA high of 65.8% in 1980 -- the dream of home ownership was moving out of the reach of more and more Americans. In fact, as of just before NAFTA, the home ownership rate just before NAFTA was lower even than in the late 1960s. But then things changed. After NAFTA, the home ownership rate in the US soared for over a decade:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
That's simply not the pattern we'd expect to see if somehow NAFTA were causing homes to be unaffordable. In fact, it's literally the OPPOSITE of the pattern we'd expect to see.
I have no idea what you're saying here. The economy does, in fact, go in out and of recessions. It went into recession Feb 2020, Dec 2007, March 2001, July 1990, July 1981, July 1980, November 1973, December 1969, April 1960, August 1957, and July 1953. I know it's kind of inconvenient for bothsiderists that we had Republican presidents 10 out of 11 times we fell into recession, but history doesn't care about our feelings. What happened happened and the question is simply whether we will allow the facts to influence our understanding, or whether we will insist on our gut feelings and reject the facts.
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