No to the Village People, but Yes to ‘Bait-and-Switch’?
First, let me thank those column readers and The Trade Guys podcast listeners who wrote in about last week’s column/episode. You will be relieved to know that Scott Miller and I do not intend to channel the Village People and sing “YMCA” on the next podcast.
While I am on that subject, however (the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement or USMCA, not YMCA), I do want to alert everyone to the over-selling that has already begun. Our current president oversells everything he does but for trade agreements that have long been par for the course. Economists have disagreed for 24 years about whether the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been a net positive or negative for our economy, and even those who agree on the overall direction do not agree on the magnitude; however, if you look at the statements politicians made about it in 1993 and 1994, NAFTA was the greatest thing that ever happened to our economy.