Why I don't like trade agreements

As I'm writing this I am watching the aftermath reports of the N.H. primary. Christie has left the race and so has Fiorina, no big surprise there. Ben Carson should put on his big boy pants and drop next but he is holding on like he just found out his dad was Peter Pan. I'm watching as Kasich is trying to distance himself from the GOP establishment, a tactic I don't think will work. He is more moderate than many of the GOP but I am not sure how far he strays from the machine. I do think he would work with Democrats better than most of his party, but whether or not he has the oomph of Trump remains to be seen. Watching these events transpire, I think of a subject that has ticked me off for awhile and with the recent months my flame has been fanned about this. Trade acts. In 1993 then President Clinton signed into law N.A.F.T.A. which was a Republican backed idea that a Democrat President not only signed, but worked at selling it to the public. By 1999 millions of textile industry jobs were lost to foreign lands, many of them to Mexico. I pick that year and that industry because 1999 was the year a woolen mill I was a shift supervisor at closed it's doors putting roughly 350 local workers in a small rural area out to pasture. Trade agreements seek to even the playing field between multiple countries. The problem for America in this theory is that it comes at our blue collar workers expense. Bill Clinton said that these agreements would encourage people to get higher education and better jobs. Encourage is a fancy word for force by the way. The problem with that theory is aptitude. If a persons aptitude is not one that is geared for college, then where does that leave them? In a job market that now has less good paying positions that's where. Plenty of these folks put out of work ended up in the service industry for less pay and less benefits. Not long ago, I was shopping in WalMart and ran into a fellow that I had worked with at the mill. Seventeen years later he was just catching up to where his pay had been at the mill. Seventeen years! I myself took a two dollar an hour cut in pay so I could work somewhere with decent benefits for my family. I'm still at this job seventeen years later. It's fair to say that if the mill was still open I would be there and would have gotten similar raises through the years. So that two dollars becomes four thousand dollars a year more I would have made over the last seventeen years. That's 68,000 dollars less spending power and quality of life I have had. Now times that by however many manufacturing jobs that were turned into service industry jobs and that becomes a lot of money. We just signed a Pacific trade act that as I understand it, could hurt the airplane builders and auto builders in this country. So not only did we sign away textile and other manufacturing jobs over the past decades, but now we are going after the airplane and auto workers. Didn't we toss billions of dollars to companies to "save" the auto industry? Did we do that only to turn around and tear that down as we have other forms of manufacturing? If our politicians want to strengthen our country again, they should look to reversing the power and effects of the trade acts, before we completely paralyze our work force and turn us all into needing handouts. We need a President who will work to bring jobs back into our country. People don't want handouts, they want a job they can survive on and be productive in society with. So yeah I don't like the trade acts, I have 68,000 personal reasons not to.