Economists for decades have agreed that more open international trade is good for the U.S. economy. But recent research finds that while that's still true, when it comes to China, the downside for American workers has been much more painful than the experts predicted. Author claims from 2000 to 2007, trade with China destroyed nearly 1 million U.S. manufacturing jobs. That's apart from other job losses due to technology and productivity gains and automation. http://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474393701/china-killed-1-million-u-s-jobs-but-don-t-blame-trade-deals Here's useful chart showing US manufacturing employment as a percentage of the total workforce, because NPR article is using lame 'Some Cheese And Toy Cars Explanation': https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=44qi
Well, the economists who say don't blame the trade deals are the same ones caught by surprise when the employment stats came out. So let's say the people who have been blaming the trade deals all along - before they cost a single job or scuttled a single environmental regulation, just by looking at them - who were not caught by surprise by these employment statistics, but have been pointing to them for years now - might have been right all along, and "the economists" who crunched theoretical numbers - and never considered what a town's economy would look like if its largest employer was a Walmart without a single locally made item in it - might have been missing some key aspects of reality.
