The issue is the cheaper goods from mexico come from their 4 A DAY minimum wage... its all labor cost... not really product cost, and much of it it negated by shipping costs... with Wal mart,for instance, they will offer to buy a billion units of an item but force the base work for the product to move its factory to china or some other company that lets them pay a person less than a dollar a day.. they save a penny or two per unit, but to the company thats millions over time... if they did make the item here you are talking percentage wise maybe a few cents or a buck increase in price. Its not drastic...
Im not at all a fan of how the us does its minimum wage, but if tgey insist on doing it tgat way they have to equalize labor costs with countries that basically have near slave labor compensation
For most commodity goods, like regular food and stuff bought at average groceries and stores, and for things like machine parts, bulk commodities used in final production, machine assembly, etc. the labor cost is the dominant factor.
This is why cars are made just over the border, and iphones are made in China. If commodity costs are the same, then the other costs of production (utilities, land,
labor, taxes, shipping, etc.) matter. Cheap energy, cheap labor and low taxes all favor the shipping of cheap items all around the world. The most easily controllable, especially in very poor countries, is the labor force. Thus the great supply of goods from SE Asia and Mexico.
Free trade was supposed to allow for this economic transfer to be balanced by the opposite directional trade of higher value goods, with superior technology. And, most would agree that even if this wasn't exactly balanced, getting China to make dirty stuff like chemicals and steel was better than doing it nearby. The ability of the very poor, on average, foreign worker to gain an improved lifestyle from the meager amounts they were to be paid was also a net global societal good.
This is a good trade off, if the cheap commodity goods are in relatively equal value to the high value stuff going in the other direction. But it is clearly unbalanced now, and the various governments, including and especially the dominant US, have chosen to use taxes, currencies and other local policies to corrupt this potential.
But you have to be careful what you wish for: by effectively raising the price on those now foreign cheap commodity goods, all consumers of those lower end commodity things like food, tvs, cars, etc. will have to pay more. The
standard of living on both ends of less trading almost has to go lower.
If one was going to look at each trade deal, and attempt to rework with a long term goal, a good place to start would be all those countries with deals from politically important folks, including Buffet, Gates, Clinton, Gore, etc.....
