[American Thinker] Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece, "In America’s Absence, the TPP Goes On," bemoaning how Trump’s withdrawal from TPP has hurt exporters. But somehow it left out information about how total exports are actually doing. (It must be an innocent oversight and not based on any agenda.)
If the WSJ would look at actual total exports, they are up substantially year over year in every quarter of 2018 over 2017, and in 2017 they were up substantially over 2016 in every quarter.
So how exactly are exporters being hurt if total exports are continually up? Especially since the worldwide economy is slowing.
The WSJ predicted that Trump’s trade policies and tariffs would harm the economy and cause higher inflation. Neither is true. The economy is growing faster than any time since 2005 and import price inflation for November 2018 vs 2017 was only .7%, lower than the overall rate inflation.
It seems that no matter what the facts are on trade and no matter how far off previous predictions were by the WSJ and others, the narrative remains the same.
It is bad enough to read this stuff in the NYT, WP and by the AP. It is worse to read it in what used to be a newspaper that was much more balanced.
It was always abject ignorance to believe countries would stop trading with the U.S. if Trump wanted bilateral trade agreements that the U.S. controls in place of global agreements under some global body. Why would countries be so stubborn to stop trading with the richest and biggest economy in the World? |