With plenty of anti-NAFTA talk coming from both Democratic candidates in Ohio that staunch foe of free trade Pat Buchanan has written a column attacking the agreement. Buchanan indicts not only the NAFTA agreement but attacks the Bush economic record pretty heavily. Some pretty intriguing factoids in the Buchanan column.

Our workers’ instincts are backed up by stats. In 2007, the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico soared 16 percent to $73 billion, a record. Mexico now ships more cars to us now than we ship to the world. And where did Mexico get an auto industry?

What about our trade with China?

The U.S. trade deficit with China shot up 10 percent to $256 billion, the largest trade deficit ever between any two countries.

How does anyone consider that to be fair trade?

Charles MacMillion of MBG Services has run the numbers.

In manufactures, the United States had a trade deficit of $499 billion in 2007, a slight improvement over the $526 billion record in 2006. Yet that trade deficit in manufactured goods with the world is more than twice as large as our $224 billion bill for OPEC’s oil.

Under Bush, the U.S. trade deficit has doubled. Three million manufacturing jobs have vanished. And America has begun to run a trade deficit in advanced technology goods of more than $50 billion.

Our trade deficit in advanced technology goods with China is $67 billion, eight times what it is with Japan.

What do these numbers tell Buchanan? Well the obvious effect on manufacturing cannot be denied.

“Free trade is essential to the creation of high-paying quality jobs,” said Bush on Thursday.
But if exports create jobs (and they do), imports displace them. And if we import half a trillion dollars more in manufactures than we export, is not Bush trade policy literally slaughtering industrial jobs?

Buchanan then lays out the Bush record for all to see.

Is there not a correlation between $4.3 trillion in trade deficits under Bush, the 3 million manufacturing jobs lost under Bush, the fall of the dollar by 50 percent against the euro under Bush and the resurgence of inflation, signaled by a quadrupling of the price of gold, under Bush?

Buchanan cites the huge growth in the U.S. economy in years gone by when the country was at its most protectionist.

This is ahistorical nonsense. From 1860 to 1913, the United States was the most protectionist nation on earth and produced the most awesome growth of any nation in history. In 1860, the U.S. economy was half of Britain’s; in 1913, more than twice Britain’s.

And so Buchanan calls out his conservative bretheren, calling on Republicans to repudiate free trade.

America rose to power behind a Republican tariff wall. What has free trade wrought? Lost sovereignty. A sinking dollar. A hollowing out of U.S. manufacturing. Stagnant wages.
Wives forced into the labor market to maintain the family income. Mass indebtedness to foreign nations, and a deepening dependency on foreign goods and borrowings to pay for them. We have sacrificed our country on the altar of this Moloch, the mythical Global Economy.

It took Rip Van Republican 20 years to wake up to the disaster of open borders and five years to realize the folly of igniting wars in which no vital interest was at risk. How long before the GOP wakes up to the reality that globalism is not conservatism, never was, but is a pillar of Wilsonian liberalism, in whose vineyards our faux conservatives now daily labor.

A pretty good indictment of the failed economic policies of this administration. And as Buchanan is fond of saying the chickens are coming home to roost.

Read the Buchanan column here.