How about a dispassionate look at the manufacturing employment numbers over a long period of time? Isn't manufacturing the thing that was "decimated" in the US by NAFTA?

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES3000000001

[edit: Here's the graph - dunno how long it will last]



If you look at the BLS data for Manufacturing Employment from, say, 1970 - 2016 you see a three obvious features:

1) lots of oscillations around a level of about 17.5 M (oscillations apparently due to the business cycle)

2) a dramatic fall from 2001 - 2010

3) a rise from 2010 - 2015

It's hard for me to see that you can tie the changes in manufacturing employment from 2001 on to NAFTA. NAFTA took effect on January 1, 1994. It took 7 years for it to have a big impact on manufacturing employment? Really?

And manufacturing employment did go up from 1994 - 1998 according to those numbers.

Maybe electing W, and the bursting of the Tech Bubble, and the freakout over 9/11 and the rise in oil prices, and a bunch of other things, had much more to do with fall in manufacturing employment than NAFTA.

Maybe. (I haven't read your link yet, but I'm suspicious of too much precision in numbers like "682,900 jobs lost to NAFTA".)

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.