Originally Posted by Americano

What GDP gains? Without government injections of capital derived from debt, including spending deficits, SS 'surplus' collections and supplementary funding for Iraq and their economic flow through multipliers, GDP would be stagnant at best and in reality showing a decline.

While educational and retraining programs sound like a positive step forward, what jobs would the education/retraining be directed at? The US is in a post-industrial service economy and replacing skilled manufacturing/professional jobs with 'new' jobs in the service sector requiring lower skill levels and offering diminished pay and few or no benefits. What would people be retrained to do?

NAFTA has not cost Canada, Mexico or the US any significant job loss. Those countries, and others, are experiencing job function relocation to China, India, Malaysia and other developing countries that offer the low wages, efficient operating costs with supporting infrastructure that attracts capital investment. The former circumstance of industrial jobs that offered unskilled entry level jobs with an almost guaranteed path to skills, better wages and benefits are long gone in the Americas. What remains of manufacturing in the NAFTA scenario is almost exclusively assembly of components actually manufactured in developing countries that make more money for those developing countries from bypassing finished product quotas and tariffs.