Republicans mull if trade deals worth Obama's price

Source: Reuters

Tue, May 24 2011
Republicans mull if trade deals worth Obama's price

WASHINGTON, June 2 (Reuters) - Does the United States, faced with a huge budget deficit, really need a roughly $1 billion annual program to help retrain workers who have lost their jobs because of foreign competition?

And if not, should Congress kill or pare back the nearly 50-year-old Trade Adjustment Assistance program even if that means proposed free trade deals with South Korea, Panama and Colombia could also die?

Those are two questions confronting Republicans as they consider President Barack Obama's threat not to send the trade pacts to Congress for approval until there is a deal to renew the so-called TAA at or near levels approved in 2009.

~snip~
The three trade deals were originally negotiated during the Republican administration of former President George W. Bush and approval of the pacts has been a party priority.



Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/02/usa-trade-workers-idUSN0225369620110602?rpc=401

another nafta type program for another Democrat president to get passed? Didn't we learn anything from GHWB and his gift to Clinton? NAFTA was Poppies idea not ours. And it did just exactly what the rethugs wanted it to do - allow more and more outsourcing.

(Smoot/Hawley/Hoover). Same with immigration laws - repubs in 1921/1924 both very restrictive and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 - Democrats passed the Immigration Act of 1965 that greatly liberalized immigration.

Repubs are historically more comfortable trying to keep 'others' and their stuff out of the country than they are with how to we can trade, travel and live more with each other. Repubs here have finally caught up with progressives in Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere in understanding the value of trade. Even now their base and teabaggers are dragging them back away from immigration and trade with 'others', just as the right wing in Europe is trying to close trade and immigration borders on the continent.