Talking Point in Defense of TPP Is 95% Irrelevant

As the fight intensifies against Fast Track for the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) - with new members of Congress and more than 2,000 U.S. groups declaring their opposition - the Obama administration has decided not to switch its talking points, but to state the same ones more loudly. 

The administration seems particularly fond of flogging this one in recent TPP-defending speeches, press releases, and Internet memes: “Almost 95% of the world's consumers are outside America’s borders.”

No one is questioning the veracity of this demographic observation.  The question is what it has to do with the TPP.

Not much, as it turns out. Here's why the "95%" statistic is irrelevant for the TPP: 

• U.S. products already enjoy tariff-free access to consumers in most TPP countries. The United States already has Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with six of the 11 TPP negotiating countries, meaning tariffs on U.S. products already have been zeroed out. And in Japan, which comprises 88 percent of the combined gross domestic product of the TPP countries that do not already have a U.S. FTA, the average applied tariff is just 1.2 percent. New Zealand’s average applied tariff is 1.4 percent. Such low barriers are why prominent economists like Paul Krugman have scoffed at the economic significance of the TPP, and why a U.S. government study projects 0.00 percent U.S. economic growth even if all TPP countries eliminated all existing tariffs on all products.

• The remaining three TPP countries account for just 1.7% of the world’s consumers. That includes Brunei, which has a population about the size of Mobile, Alabama.

• In the two TPP countries that actually have sizable populations and average tariffs above a mere 1.5 percent, most people do not earn enough money to purchase many U.S. exports. In Vietnam, the average person earns just $1,740 per year. In Malaysia, which has one third as many consumers as Vietnam, per capita annual income is $10,430. Neither country represents significant purchasing power for exports of U.S.-made products.  

• Even if the TPP represented significant new market access, TPP-style "trade" deals have not succeeded in helping U.S. firms reach consumers outside our borders. The official U.S. government trade data reveal that U.S. goods exports to our existing FTA partners have grown 20 percent slower than U.S. exports to the rest of the world over the last decade. 

Where did the administration get such a weak talking point?  The Chamber of Commerce.  The corporate alliance has been trumpeting the same 95% statistic for at least the last three years.  It appears that rather than create its own sales pitch for the TPP, the administration decided to borrow one straight from the multinational corporations behind the deal.  

Given that this particular talking point is about 95% irrelevant for the TPP, maybe the administration should ask the deal's corporate backers for a new one. 

Hatch Bill Would Revive Controversial 2002 Fast Track Mechanism That Faces Broad Congressional, Public Opposition

Today’s Proposal Replicates Language of Failed 2014 Bill, Would Expand Same Broken Trade Model That Has Led to $912 Billion Trade Deficit, Loss of Millions of Manufacturing Jobs, Attacks on Public Interest Policies 

The trade authority bill introduced today would revive the controversial Fast Track procedures to which nearly all U.S. House of Representatives Democrats and a sizable bloc of House Republicans already have announced opposition.  Most of the text of this bill replicates word-for-word the text of the 2014 Fast Track bill, which itself replicated much of the 2002 Fast Track bill. Public Citizen calls on Congress to again oppose the outdated, anti-democratic Fast Track authority as a first step to replacing decades of “trade” policy that has led to the loss of millions of middle-class jobs and the rollback of critical public interest safeguards.

In the past 21 years, Fast Track authority has been authorized only once by Congress – from 2002 to 2007. In 1998, the U.S. House of Representatives voted down Fast Track for President Bill Clinton, with 71 GOP members joining 171 House Democrats.

Today’s bill explicitly grandfathers in Fast Track coverage for the almost-completed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and would extend Fast Track procedures for three to six years. The bill would delegate away Congress’ constitutional trade authority, even after the Obama administration dismissed bipartisan and bicameral demands that the TPP include enforceable currency manipulation disciplines. The trade authority proposal would not require negotiators to actually meet Congress’ negotiating objectives in order to obtain the Fast Track privileges, making the bill’s negotiating objectives entirely unenforceable.

“Congress is being asked to delegate away its constitutional trade authority over the TPP, even after the administration ignored bicameral, bipartisan demands about the agreement’s terms, and then also grant blank-check authority to whomever may be the next president for any agreements he or she may pursue,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “Rather than putting Congress in the driver’s seat on trade, this bill is just the same old Fast Track that puts Congress in the trunk in handcuffs. I expect that Congress will say no to it.”

Instead of establishing a new “exit ramp,” the bill literally replicates the same impossible conditions from past Fast Track bills that make the “procedural disapproval” mechanism to remove an agreement from Fast Track unusable. A resolution to do so must be approved by both the Senate Finance and the House Ways and Means committees and then be passed by both chambers within 60 days. The bill’s only new feature in this respect is a new “consultation and compliance” procedure that would only be usable after an agreement was already signed and entered into, at which point changes to the pact could be made only if all other negotiating parties agreed to reopen negotiations and then agreed to the changes (likely after extracting further concessions from the United States). That process would require approval by 60 Senators to take a pact off of Fast Track consideration, even though a simple majority “no” vote in the Senate would have the same effect on an agreement. In contrast, the 1988 Fast Track empowered either the House Ways and Means or the Senate Finance committees to vote by simple majority to remove a pact from Fast Track consideration, with no additional floor votes required. And, such a disapproval action was authorized before a president could sign and enter into a trade agreement.

“Chairman Hatch said he would never accept changes that make it possible for Congress to remove Fast Track from an agreement that does not measure up, and he got his way,” said Wallach. “What is being advertised as a new safeguard is not an exit from Fast Track’s confiscation of Congress’ policymaking prerogatives, but new curtains hung over the same brick wall.”

Today’s bill faces long odds for approval. Members of Congress who supported past trade initiatives have been angered by the extreme secrecy of TPP negotiations and the administration’s refusal to include currency disciplines in the pact.

The bill proposed today makes only minor adjustments to the Hatch-Camp-Baucus Fast Track bill that was dead on arrival in the House when it was introduced in 2014. At the time, only eight out of 201 House Democrats supported the bill and House GOP leaders could not count more than 100 members as “yes” votes. Since then, 14 of the 17 current freshman Democrats in the House have signed letters opposing Fast Track despite pressure from the administration. And, in contrast to past Congresses, a sizable bloc of freshmen GOP members has refused to declare support for Fast Track despite a corporate lobby push.

“This bill is a repeat of the Fast Track proposal that died a quick death one year ago,” said Wallach. “The only difference is that that congressional opposition to the very concept of Fast Track authority has grown.”

The bill comes despite broad and growing opposition to Fast Track and the TPP. A 2015 bipartisan poll from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News shows that 75 percent of Americans think that the TPP should be rejected or delayed. In recent weeks, voters in Maryland, Oregon, Washington, Connecticut, Colorado and other states protested against Fast Track, citing the devastating impact past Fast Tracked pacts have had on local jobs, small businesses and farmers. Recent data show that similar trade deals have already pushed the United States to the precipice of a historic $1 trillion trade deficit, contributed to the loss of five million American manufacturing jobs and increased U.S. income inequality. 

Today’s bill, sponsored by U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), House Ways and Means Chair Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), failed to attract a single House Democratic sponsor. Today’s bill would:

• Empower the executive branch to unilaterally select partner countries for a trade pact, determine an agreement’s contents through the negotiating process, and then sign and enter into an agreement – all before Congress voted to approve a trade pact’s contents, regardless of whether a pact met Congress’ negotiating objectives;

• Authorize the executive branch to write legislation containing any terms the White House decides are “necessary or appropriate” to implement the pact. Such legislation would not be subject to normal congressional committee review and markup, meaning this and future administrations could include in a Fast Tracked trade bill whatever terms it desired;

• Require votes in both the House and Senate within 90 days, forbidding any amendments and limiting debate to 20 hours, whether or not Congress’ negotiating objectives were met. 

An analysis of today’s bill shows that: 

• The Hatch bill includes several negotiating objectives not found in the 2002 Fast Track authority, most of which were also in the 2014 bill. However, the Fast Track process that the legislation would re-establish ensures that these negotiating objectives are entirely unenforceable. Whether or not Congress’ negotiating objectives are met, the president could sign a pact before Congress approves it and obtain a yes or no vote in 90 days. Democratic and GOP presidents alike have historically ignored negotiating objectives included in Fast Track. The 1988 Fast Track used for the North American Free Trade Agreement and the establishment of the World Trade Organization included a negotiating objective on labor standards, but neither pact included such terms. The 2002 Fast Track listed as a priority the establishment of mechanisms to counter currency manipulation, but none of the pacts established under that authority included such terms.

• Some of the Hatch bill negotiating objectives advertised as “new” are in fact identical to what was in the 2014 bill and were referenced in the 2002 Fast Track. For example, the 2002 Fast Track included currency measures: “seek to establish consultative mechanisms among parties to trade agreements to examine the trade consequences of significant and unanticipated currency movements and to scrutinize whether a foreign government engaged in a pattern of manipulating its currency to promote a competitive advantage in international trade.” (19 USC 3802(c)(12)) The so-called “new” text in the Hatch bill repeats word-for-word what was in the 2014 Fast Track bill: “The principal negotiating objective of the United States with respect to currency practices is that parties to a trade agreement with the United States avoid manipulating exchange rates in order to prevent effective balance of payments adjustment or to gain an unfair competitive advantage over other parties to the agreement, such as through cooperative mechanisms, enforceable rules, reporting, monitoring, transparency, or other means, as appropriate.” Even if Congress had the power to ensure that this negotiating objective was met, the language of this negotiating objective itself does not require enforceable disciplines on currency manipulation to be included in the TPP or other deals obtaining Fast Track treatment. Despite the requests from bipartisan majorities of both houses of Congress that enforceable currency manipulation disciplines be included in the TPP, the Hatch negotiating objective lists “enforceable rules” as just one approach among several non-binding options for the TPP and other Fast Tracked deals. 

• Provisions that are being touted as improving transparency, by empowering the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to develop standards for staff access to negotiating texts, would in fact provide a statutory basis for the unacceptable practice of requiring congressional staff to have security clearances to view any draft trade pact text and would fail to match even the level of transparency seen during the Bush administration’s trade negotiations. A close read of a new provision requiring USTR to post a trade agreement text on its website 60 days before signing reveals that this timing would be 30 days after the agreement was initialed and the text locked, meaning the text would only become public after it was too late for the public or Congress to demand changes.

• Today’s bill includes a new negotiating objective related to human rights: “to promote respect for internationally recognized human rights.”  But since the bill does not alter the fundamental Fast Track process, the president still would be able to unilaterally pick countries with serious human rights abuses as trade negotiating partners, initiate negotiations with them, conclude negotiations, and sign and enter into the trade agreement with the governments committing the abuses, with no opportunity for Congress to require the president to do otherwise. 

• The bill’s terms regarding labor and the environment replicate those of the 2014 Fast Track bill, which in turn memorialize the provisions of the “May 10, 2007” deal that, according to recent government reports, have proven ineffective. While the May 10 provisions went beyond the 2002 Fast Track objectives regarding labor, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released in November 2014 found broad labor rights violations across five surveyed Free Trade Agreement (FTA) partner countries, regardless of whether or not the FTA included the labor provisions of the May 10 deal.

• What the bill’s co-sponsors are touting as “strengthen[ing] congressional oversight” is actually the renaming of the 2002 Congressional Oversight Group as the “House Advisory Group on Negotiations” and the “Senate Advisory Group on Negotiations.”  This exact language was also in the 2014 bill.

For additional, in-depth analysis of the Hatch bill provisions, visit www.citizen.org/fast-track-2015.

Cato and Public Citizen: No parallel legal system for foreign corporations

Here's something you won't see every day: an op-ed jointly written by analysts at Public Citizen and the Cato Institute.  Often divided on issues of trade policy, we find common ground in opposing the proposed expansion, via the Trans-Pacific Partnership, of a shadow legal system for foreign corporations.  Read about it in today's The Hill.  Here's an excerpt:

Special courts for foreign investors

By Simon Lester and Ben Beachy

On the precipice of the biggest congressional trade debate in decades, a once-arcane investment provision has become a lightning rod of controversy in the intensifying battle over whether Congress should revive Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), also known as “fast track,” for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) calls this provision a system of “rigged, pseudo-courts.” The Republican leadership of the House Ways and Means Committee defends it as “a vital part of any trade agreement.”

But this is not your standard partisan congressional battle. Inside Congress and out, criticism and support for this parallel legal system, known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), crosses the political spectrum. Analysts with the Cato Institute and Public Citizen usually stand on opposing sides of trade policy issues, but we find common ground in opposing this system of special privileges for foreign firms.

The TPP would extend this controversial system, found in some existing trade pacts and investment treaties, to new countries and tens of thousands of new companies. Under ISDS, “foreign investors” – mostly transnational corporations – have the ability to bypass U.S. courts and challenge U.S. government action and inaction before international tribunals authorized to order U.S. taxpayer compensation to the firms.

Pacts with ISDS are often promoted as simply prohibiting discrimination against foreign firms. In reality, they go well beyond non-discrimination, and create amorphous government obligations that have given rise to corporate lawsuits against a wide array of policies with relevance across the political spectrum. Foreign corporations have used this system to challenge policies ranging from the phase-out of nuclear power to the roll-back of renewable energy subsidies. Nearly all government actions and inactions are subject to challenge, covering local, state, and federal measures taken by courts, legislators and regulators.

Take, for example, the recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings that companies cannot patent human genes or obtain abstract software patents favored by patent trolls. Foreign holders of those patents could use ISDS to claim that these decisions interfere with their patent rights and ask an international tribunal to order compensation from the U.S. government...

Click here for the full op-ed from The Hill

50 Reasons We Cannot Afford the TPP

How would your state be impacted by the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a controversial “free trade” agreement (FTA) being negotiated behind closed doors with 11 Pacific Rim countries? 

Click here for a state-by-state guide to the specific outcomes of the status quo “trade” model that the TPP would expand.  Get the latest government data on how many jobs have been lost in your state to unfair trade, how much inequality has risen, how many family farms have disappeared, and how large your state’s trade deficit with FTA countries has grown. 

The TPP would extend the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) model that has contributed to massive U.S. trade deficits and job loss, downward pressure on middle class wages, unprecedented levels of inequality, lagging exports, new floods of agricultural imports, and the loss of family farms.

These impacts have been felt across all 50 U.S. states.  Here is a sampling of the outcomes:

• North Carolina: North Carolina has lost more than 369,000 manufacturing jobs – nearly half – since NAFTA and NAFTA expansion pacts have taken effect.  More than 212,000 specific North Carolina jobs have been certified under just one narrow Department of Labor program as lost to offshoring or imports since NAFTA.

• Delaware: Delaware’s total goods exports to all U.S. FTA partners have actually fallen 27 percent while its exports to non-FTA nations have grown 34 percent in the last five years. 

• California: In the last five years, California’s $403 million NAFTA agricultural trade surplus became a $187 million trade deficit – a more than $590 million drop. In contrast, California’s agricultural trade surplus with the rest of the world increased by $3 billion, or 79 percent, during the same time period.  The disparity owes to the fact that California’s exports of agricultural products to NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada grew just 27 percent, or $693 million, in the last five years, while its agricultural exports to the rest of the world grew 70 percent, or $4.3 billion. Meanwhile, California’s agricultural imports from NAFTA partners during this period surged $1.3 billion – more than the increase in agricultural imports from all other countries combined.

• Michigan: Michigan’s trade deficit with all U.S. FTA partners is nearly five times larger than its deficit with the rest of the world. Michigan’s FTA deficit has grown more than three times as much as its non-FTA deficit in the last five years. Today, Michigan’s trade deficit with FTA partners comprises 83 percent of the state’s total trade deficit.

• Louisiana: Before the Korea FTA – the U.S. template for the TPP – the United States had balanced trade with Korea in the top 10 products that Louisiana exports to Korea – including everything from metal to agricultural products. Under two years of the FTA, that balance became a $9 billion annual trade deficit. 

• New York: The TPP and the Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) would empower 3,067 foreign corporations doing business in New York to bypass domestic courts, go before extrajudicial tribunals, and challenge New York and U.S. health, environmental and other public interest policies that they claim undermine new foreign investor rights not available to domestic firms under U.S. law.

• Texas: U.S. farmers were promised that the Korea FTA would boost U.S. agricultural exports to Korea. But U.S. exports to Korea fell in eight of Texas’ top 10 agricultural export products, from cotton to wheat to meat in the first two years of the Korea FTA.  Meanwhile, U.S. exports to Korea of beef, pork and poultry – all top agricultural exports for Texas – declined 18, 15, and 42 percent, respectively (measuring by volume).

• Nevada: The richest 10 percent of Nevadans are now capturing more than half of all income in the state – a degree of inequality not seen in the 100 years for which records exist.  Study after study has produced an academic consensus that status quo trade has contributed to today’s unprecedented rise in income inequality.  

• Minnesota: Small-scale U.S. family farms have been hardest hit by rising agricultural imports and declining agricultural trade balances under FTAs.  Since NAFTA took effect, 15,500 of Minnesota’s smaller-scale farms (24 percent) have disappeared.

Fact-Checking the Fact-Checker: Washington Post Gets It Wrong on Bogus Trade-Pact Jobs Claims

As the Obama administration seeks to Fast Track the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) through Congress over public and congressional opposition, it has resorted to a familiar tactic – promising job gains from the deal on the basis of unfounded assumptions. We have repeatedly warned against dubious TPP jobs claims by spotlighting the inaccuracy of the administration’s job claims for the last major trade pact – the 2012 Korea “free trade” agreement (FTA). The Korea FTA was used as the U.S. template for the TPP.

The White House promised that the Korea FTA would create 70,000 jobs based on a report issued by the U.S. International Trade Commission that projected an increase in U.S. goods exports and a decrease in the U.S. goods trade deficit with Korea. In contrast, in the first three years of the Korea pact, U.S. goods exports to Korea have fallen while our goods trade deficit with Korea has surged.

We have shown that, plugging the actual U.S. government trade data into the ratio that the administration used to project job gains from the pact, the first three years of the Korea FTA’s outcomes defy the administration’s “more exports, more jobs” slogan for the deal, providing a cautionary tale for the job claims the administration is currently using to sell the TPP.

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker columnist Glenn Kessler has similarly taken on the administration’s TPP job claims, describing them as a baseless fabrication. But in today’s Post, Kessler takes issue with our fact-checking of the administration’s Korea FTA jobs promise.

Kessler seems to think that we are producing our own jobs projection for the Korea FTA, when we are actually fact-checking the administration’s jobs projection – a projection that Kessler acknowledges “would have earned Pinocchios if it had come to our attention at the time.” It is unclear why Kessler is now assigning Pinocchios to us for calling out the administration’s bogus Korea FTA jobs claim, rather than to those who actually made the claim.

In our recent press release on the third anniversary of the Korea FTA, we stated:

The U.S. goods trade deficit with Korea has ballooned an estimated 84 percent, or $12.7 billion, in the first three years of the Korea FTA (comparing the year before the FTA took effect to the projected third full year of implementation)…The surge in the U.S. trade deficit with Korea under the FTA equates to the loss of nearly 85,000 American jobs, according to the trade-jobs ratio that the administration used to promise job gains from the deal.

Kessler’s primary critique of this statement appears to be that we did not replicate the administration’s flawed methodology of only counting exports and disregarding imports when debunking the administration’s jobs projection. Such a misleading approach – ignoring half of the trade equation – contradicts standard economics and empirical data showing the job-displacing impacts of imports, which Kessler even acknowledges in his column today.

As an example of the administration’s one-sided trade accounting, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative’s (USTR) factsheet on the third anniversary of the Korea FTA touted that 21,255 additional vehicles were exported to Korea under the FTA. It made no mention of the 461,408 additional vehicles imported from Korea during the same time period (using the administration’s same cut of the automotive trade data). That is, for every additional vehicle the United States exported to Korea under the FTA, it imported more than 21 additional vehicles from Korea. The net effect has clearly been a loss for U.S. auto workers. It is not only contrary to mainstream economics, but common sense, to only look at exports and ignore imports when assessing trade’s impact on jobs.

Indeed, when Kessler did a Fact Checker column in January debunking the administration’s “concocted” claim that the TPP would create 650,000 U.S. jobs, he stated that the study used as the basis for that claim actually showed that “the net number of new jobs [projected for the TPP] is zero” because the study “found that imports would increase by virtually the same amount as exports.” That is, Kessler presumed that $1 in imports had a job-displacing effect equivalent to the job-supporting effect of $1 in exports, which matches the calculation used in our press release. (For what it’s worth, respected economists estimate the dollar-for-dollar job-displacing effect of imports may be even greater than the job-supporting effect of exports.)

But even if we were to abandon the common-sense approach that Kessler presumed in January, defy standard trade accounting, and only count exports, U.S. goods exports to Korea fell by more than $2 billion in the first three years of the FTA. Were we to replicate the administration’s exports-only approach, then our fact-check of the administration’s Korea FTA promises would need to say something to the effect of:

The estimated $2.6 billion decline in U.S. goods exports to Korea in the FTA’s first three years equates to the loss of 17,400 American jobs, according to the trade-jobs ratio and exports-only methodology that the administration used to promise job gains from the deal. That methodology ignores the impact of imports and the significant increase in the U.S. trade deficit with Korea since the FTA was implemented. Including imports, the surge in the U.S. trade deficit with Korea under the FTA equates to the loss of 85,000 American jobs, according to the trade-jobs ratio that the administration used to promise job gains from the deal. 

The takeaway is the same. Any (reasonable) way you slice it, the administration’s job gains promise for the Korea FTA is the opposite of the deal’s outcome thus far. Indeed, over the Korea FTA’s first three years, the actual results have been consistently the opposite of the specific export growth and job gain figures that the Obama administration used to sell the Korea FTA. And that gets back to our main point: rely on similar promises now being made for the TPP to your own peril.

Kessler also takes issue with our time frame, implying that we should have counted the trade data from January and February of 2012 as part of the results of the Korea FTA, despite the fact that the FTA actually took effect on March 15, 2012. Our measurement compares U.S. trade with Korea in the 12 months before the Korea FTA took effect (April 2011 to March 2012) with the third full year of the FTA’s implementation (April 2014 to March 2015).

Kessler dislikes this approach, which he criticizes as “trying to be very precise.” Instead, he states it would be more “appropriate” to compare calendar years. But the selective timeframe for which Kessler advocates would errantly count pre-FTA months as occurring since the FTA, while eliminating the most recent months of actual Korea FTA data.

The Fact Checker column also bizarrely faults us for adjusting for inflation. Typically, trade flow studies are criticized if they fail to perform the standard adjustment for inflation, since this would misleadingly count price increases as export or import increases. Nonetheless, Kessler considers the adjustment for inflation as “an effort to manipulate the data further.” Why?  Because “the price of goods could decrease.” It is precisely because the price of goods could decrease (or increase) that it is important to adjust for inflation. We do so by using a standard inflation adjustment from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, thereby eliminating the effect of shifts in goods prices. (And, for what it’s worth, if we were trying to “manipulate” the data rather than be scrupulous with it, we would not be the ones controlling for inflation. Failing to adjust for inflation would make the increase in the U.S. goods trade deficit with Korea during the FTA’s first three years appear even larger than it is in real terms, not smaller.)

After deciding to replicate the administration’s usual data distortions of not counting imports, counting non-FTA months as occurring since the FTA, and not adjusting for inflation, Kessler then performs his own assessment of the Korea FTA outcome, claiming that U.S. exports increased by $2.3 billion in the FTA’s first three years.

This claim is in need of a fact check, as we have not been able to replicate it with any cut of the data. If you use the selective timeframe preferred by Kessler (comparing calendar years 2011 and 2014) and skip the inflation adjustment, you get a $750,000 increase in U.S. exports, not a $2.3 billion increase. (And that "increase" owes entirely to price increases - after a standard inflation adjustment, it becomes a real export decline of more than $1 billion.) Even if you misleadingly count foreign-produced goods as “U.S. exports,” as the administration often does, you get a $1 billion increase in exports – still less than half of Kessler’s claim (and still a real decline in U.S. exports merely by properly accounting for inflation).

The only way we see to get a $2.3 billion increase in U.S. exports to Korea is by mistakenly axing an entire year of the FTA and comparing 2014 with 2012 (as if the FTA did not take effect until 2013 – one year later than its actual implementation date). Even with this blunt error, you would still need to use the arbitrary calendar year timeframe, fail to adjust for inflation, count foreign-produced goods as “U.S. exports,” and ignore imports altogether.

Using the accurate FTA time period and excluding foreign-made goods, our total goods exports to Korea actually have fallen since the Korea FTA took effect (whether or not one properly controls for inflation). Rather than acknowledge this aggregate outcome, the Fact Checker column highlights a few specific products as having “shown real gains in the past three years” of the Korea FTA. This is another common  maneuver of USTR: while overall U.S. agricultural exports to Korea increased an estimated zero percent in the FTA’s first three years, for example, USTR focuses on a $78 million gain in cherry exports. The cherry-picking in today’s Fact Checker column, however, includes products, such as apparel, that have actually not seen export gains. U.S. apparel exports to Korea actually have fallen $43 million, or 37 percent, in the Korea FTA’s first three years.

Unfortunately, this exports decline has been more the rule than the exception under the Korea FTA, as overall U.S. goods exports to Korea have fallen. Meanwhile, imports from Korea have risen, and the U.S. trade deficit with Korea has surged. The point that we have repeatedly made stands: the outcome of the FTA thus far is a far cry from the administration’s promise of “more exports, more jobs.” We would do well to keep that failed promise in mind as we now hear its echoes in the administration’s sales pitch for the TPP.