Major changes:
- To qualify as USMCA manufactured cars have to be (mostly) built by workers earning $16 per hour – in other words white workers, because mestizo and indio workers are generally not worth $16 per hour. Usually minimum wages are a bad idea, because they keep kids out of the job market and prevent them from gaining experience, but since you can place a car plant anywhere the major impact of this is that car companies are going to be making cars away from Democratic party vote banks, in federal electorates where the votes of working class whites are likely to matter.
- US gets to sell milk products to Canada. Again, jobs for Republican voters, in federal electorates where Republican votes matter.
This is a major victory for Trump’s infamous hardball deal making style. By smacking Canada hard against the wall, Canada being of all the countries in the world the country worst placed to withstand a trade war with the USA, Trump creates the expectation that you have to do trade deals his way.
Same tactic as Reagan invading Grenada. Smack the monkey to scare the gorilla. (Canada being the monkey, and China the gorilla) Also delightfully humiliates that irritating girly man with the fake eyebrows, which likely gives Trump even more joy than it gives me.
[…] Goodbuy NAFTA, hello USMCA […]
The milk thing wasn’t a good concession. Canada has higher standards for the quality of its milk. Letting USA milk flood into the market would be a step backwards. If they allow American cheese in, that would be a good thing, as there are a few really good American boutique raw organic cheesemakers that are currently kept out by limits on cheese imports.
I really don’t care if we are feeding them arsenic. It is less votes for our enemies and more votes for our allies.
And, in any case, because of the problems of transporting milk, the deal was milk products, not milk. Milk is naturally protected by the fact that is kind of heavy, and you need to get from the farm to the customer in a hurry. Legal barriers are not the big problem with milk.
[…] Source: Jim […]
THE WINNING NEVER STOPS!!!
Is the $16 per hour inflation indexed? I haven’t been able to find out.
Jim, I am offended, offended I say that you called the Prime Minister of Canada a girly man.
This is not way to talk about a person with intellectual disability and this disrespects all the world’s citizens with IQ levels multiple standard deviations below normal.
Welp, speaking as your resident Canadian commenter, I might note a few things.
First of all, in Canadian form, I must apologize for missing this thread, as it was buried by the “paternalism” one.
I also observe, with the usual mixture of non-surprise, dismay, bafflement, irritation and resignation, that nobody is even slightly interested in Canada, as evidenced by the mere seven(!) comments above this one.
I really don’t know yet what to make of the USMCA deal. I’ve been reading as much as I can, from people smarter than me, trying to
figure out what the impact is actually going to be. Surprisingly, there isn’t much out there yet, and whether that’s because people don’t care, or people don’t fully know, I don’t know. If anything, the feeling seems to be that it’s more-or-less “status quo”, and uninteresting because not very earth-shaking.
The usual suspects in our media are trying to spin it as a win for the Trudeau Liberals, while others are casting it as a win for Trump, for the Canadian Conservative Party’s electoral chances, etc. I don’t really buy any of these points of view completely.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing I’ve read was this link:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1046609350238900224.html
– short link, highly worth reading for anyone who cares about helping Canada get over its moribund mediocrity.
My personal hope is that there’s indeed an element of paternalistic benevolence to what Team Trump has been doing here.
Well Canada avoided a trade war.
A US-Canada trade war would resemble the Anglo-Irish trade war with Canada in the position of Ireland. Think real unemployment at 40-50%… think soup kitchens.
Yes, true. I have elsewhere characterized Team USA’s attitude towards Canada as, “in spite of everything, and how gay you sometimes insist on being, we’re still fond of you…”.
Bottom line – Canada was making a profit rebranding Chinese car content as Canadian car content, thus wafting it past NAFTA tariffs.
So, looses its benefits on milk and cars. Its big wins are that the existing adjudication system is retained – that Trump does not replace rule of law by rule of Trump.
***Canada was making a profit rebranding Chinese car content as Canadian car content, thus wafting it past NAFTA tariffs.***
Yes, this was pretty awful, and I had no idea about it until the recent talks (as I suspect very few Canadians did either). I’m breddy stoked about the idea that reality might force us to start actually being productive (i.e. making stuff) again.