Thread by @scottlincicome

The Trade Chapter of the 2018 Economic Report of the President (pp 219-278: whitehouse.gov/wp-content/upl…) is a stunning rebuke of... the President and his trade team.

Here's a sample of the *many* 2018ERP quotes that correct/contradict past Trump admin statements on trade (w gifs!):

"the economy has shifted again...away from manufacturing and toward service provision industries....the rise in the services share of the U.S. economy has been driven by greater demand for the high-skilled labor that is associated with the country’s rising income per capita"

"trade and economic growth are strongly and positively correlated. Frankel and Romer (1999) estimate that a 1-percentage-point increase in the ratio of trade to GDP raises per capita income by between 0.5 and 2 percent."

"This increasing economic reliance on trade makes trade policy critical to the future economy. It also means that the health of the global economy now matters more to the U.S. economy than it did historically"

"United States has been able to sustain a trade deficit in part because of the role of the US dollar in the global economy; foreigners are happy to hold US dollars and dollar-denominated assets, which they obtain by selling more goods and services to Americans than they buy"

"The aggregate trade balance is an important component of the current account balance, which reflects the excess of domestic savings over domestic investment...

...[P]olicies that try to affect the trade balance w/out considering the broader current acct balance, or vice versa, will be hard-pressed to succeed in the long run. Trade policy focused on trade balances must be linked to current acct policies"

"A contributing factor to the U.S. goods trade deficit is the strength of the dollar against other major currencies, which places downward pressure on demand for U.S. exports. The contemporary large trade deficit is not entirely unprecedented historically"

"Fiscal and monetary policies may be more important than trade policies in determining the magnitude of trade balances. The distribution of trade balances across trading partners is attributable to a variety of factors that are idiosyncratic to individual countries."

"All countries show a services surplus offsetting a goods deficit, with the U.S. running a net bilateral surplus only with Canada and the United Kingdom"

"Although trade agreements are associated with about twice as much overall trade, the causal impact on the trade balance is unclear"

"Focusing only on the trade in goods alone ignores the United States’ comparative advantage in services, which rose as a share of U.S. exports to 33.5 percent through 2017:Q3."

"The United States has led contemporary multilateral efforts to promote trade liberalization."

"the United States imposes among the lowest barriers to trade in the world" [ed note: not THE lowest]

"despite their wide and targeted use, AD/CVD actions do not always have the desired effect"

"AD/CVD actions can have real [negative] repercussions."

"the United States gets better outcomes via formal WTO adjudication than negotiation, increasing the probability that the complaint will be resolved and decreasing the time it takes to remove the barrier in question."

"the United States has won 85.7 percent of the cases it has initiated before the WTO since 1995, compared with a global average of 84.4 percent. In contrast, China’s success rate is just 66.7 percent."

"studies suggest the existence of net positive gains from NAFTA for U.S. GDP and employment"

"empirical estimates of the effect of reducing barriers to trade on the domestic economy are positive"

"The USITC (2016) estimated [US FTAs'] joint effect on U.S. GDP at 1 percent, amounting to an additional $186 billion in U.S. production, or roughly $600 in additional wages and salaries per household, based on the current labor share...."

US FTAs "generated a significant reshuffling of workers across industries, and led to net employment gains of approximately 1 percent" and "saved consumers up to $13.4 billion in goods pricing in 2014 while providing an expanded variety of goods for purchase"

US manufacturing job losses during the last 50 years were "the result of technological change and automation, economic recession, and evolving consumer tastes" (and trade)

"During these survey years, manufacturing workers constituted about 18 percent of all displaced workers on average"

"Automation and trade shifts both change the mix of skills demanded in the United States, and the skill-biased nature of these changes implies that less-skilled workers in particular may struggle to find new jobs"

"the United States has exercised leadership in pursuit of a policy of lowered trade barriers and increased market access. The gains from these actions have, as a whole, served to boost income in the U.S. as well as around the world."