The LuLac Edition #3311, October 2nd, 2016

7 SUNDAYS

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(This is a 7 part series on the major issues in this Presidential election and where the candidates stand. The information is directly from each candidate’s website. The order of appearance will vary from week to week because we will use a coin toss to determine what candidate’s views will appear first).

10/02/16
TRADE

TRUMP

Donald Trump says he favors free trade, but he has opposed several U.S. trade agreements because he says they were poorly negotiated and resulted in Americans losing jobs. In September 2015, he called the North American Free Trade Agreement a “disaster,” saying that his administration would “either renegotiate it or we will break it” if he becomes president. Trump says he would penalize U.S. companies that shift manufacturing outside the country. He called out Ford Motor Company specifically in his June 2015 speech announcing his candidacy, saying he would impose a 35 percent tax on vehicles the automaker exports to the United States from new plants in Mexico. (Ford says its recent investments in Mexico help keep it globally competitive.)
Trump also opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Obama administration’s free trade agreement with Pacific Rim nations. He says the deal was concluded in secrecy and it will primarily benefit other countries, particularly China (not part of the TPP) and Japan, and large U.S. corporations.
In November 2015, Trump outlined his plan for reforming U.S. trade relations with China. He would as president formally designate China a currency manipulator, crack down on what he says is its theft of U.S. intellectual property, and expose its various export subsidy practices. Trump would also seek to lower the U.S. corporate income tax rate, decrease the national debt, and ramp up the U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, all of which he says would bolster Washington’s bargaining position with respect to Beijing.

TRADE

CLINTON

Hillary Clinton has supported trade liberalization throughout her many decades in politics, but at times she has criticized and even opposed major agreements she said did not adequately protect workers.
As a candidate for president in 2015-2016, she has distanced herself from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, urging President Obama to heed the warnings of some leading congressional Democrats who say the twelve-nation initiative could displace thousands of American jobs. “Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase prosperity and protect our security,” Clinton said in New Hampshire in April 2015.
In October, after the twelve member states signed on to the TPP, Clinton said the proposed trade deal failed to meet her standards. “I have said from the very beginning that we had to have a trade agreement that would create good American jobs, raise wages and advance our national security, and I still believe that is the high bar we have to meet,” she said. “I don't believe it's going to meet the high bar I have set.”
Clinton officially supported the TPP during her time as secretary of state. In 2011 she wrote that the agreement was central to the Obama administration’s strategic “pivot” to Asia, and described it in 2012 as “the gold standard in trade agreements.” In her 2014 memoir Hard Choices, she wrote: “It’s safe to say that TPP won’t be perfect—no deal negotiated among a dozen countries ever will be—but its higher standards, if implemented and enforced, should benefit American businesses and workers.”
Clinton favored reauthorizing the U.S. Export-Import Bank, a decades-old trade promotion agency that many Republicans say distorts the free market. “Across our country, the Export-Import Bank supports up to 164,000 jobs,” Clinton said weeks before the bank lost its charter in June 2015.
As a senator from New York (2001–2009), Clinton’s record on trade was mixed: She voted in favor of bilateral agreements with Australia, Chile, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Peru, and Singapore, but voted against the Central American Free Trade Agreement on grounds that it lacked robust protections for foreign workers. As a candidate for president in 2007, she called NAFTA, an accord signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993, “flawed” and vowed to renegotiate some of its components.

presidential-candidates.insidegov.com/...