Not even ‘that’ good a deal.

If you’ve been following the economic analysis of the Trans Pacific Partnership (as opposed to the political, ecological, intellectual property, and human rights analyses which are uniformly more horrible than even the strongest detractors were warning) you’ll have noticed that even the World Trade Organization, a fanatically pro-trade group as you might imagine from the name, is predicting negligible job gains or Gross Domestic Product growth in the participant countries except for the most backward and reprehensible ones including Vietnam and especially Malaysia, where sexual human trafficing and out and out labor slavery are commonplace and unlikely to be effected in the least by the agreement if enacted.

Nice to know the United States, under a Black president, is promoting slavery again, makes me want to break out in a chorus of Dixie.

Now by far the most common lie being told about TPP (from an economic standpoint) is inflating it by accumulating 10 years of ‘benefits’ and using that instead of the annual rate, so if you hear or read that TPP will improve GDP .7% over 10 years (itself a infinitismal amount, really within rounding errors) please remember it’s only .07% annually (slightly more pure bullshit than Ivory Soap which only promises 99.44% purity).

And the WTO’s model is not the only one out there-

‘More Realistic’ Modelling Of TPP’s Effects Predicts 450,000 US Jobs Lost, Contraction Of Economy
by Glyn Moody
Tue, Jan 19th 2016

Last week we wrote about a World Bank report that predicted that TPP would produce negligible boosts to the economies of the US, Australia and Canada. Of course, that’s just one study, and it could be argued that it might be unrepresentative, or unduly pessimistic. That makes the publication of yet more econometric modelling of what could happen particularly welcome. It comes from Jerome Capaldo and Alex Izurieta at Tufts University.
…
Assuming that TPP won’t change employment levels in any of the participating nations seems a stretch, not least because previous trade liberalization has caused sizable job losses, as the new study notes. At the very least, it means that those using these models to argue in favor of TPP shouldn’t be making any claims about its effects on employment, since these don’t exist by definition. Capaldo and Izurieta are able to look at how jobs are affected because they use a different model, which they claim is superior to the one found in most other studies.

In fact, they predict net losses of 0.54% and 0.12% of GDP in the United States and Japan respectively. For the US they predict the loss of 450,00 jobs, with 75,000 in Japan and 58,000 in Canada. Even in New Zealand where net exports are expected to rise the most will lose about 5,000 jobs. The overall total is something like 771,000 among the signatories of the TPP with a larger loss among non-member states.

Although this is just one (more) study, it does seem to confirm the more gloomy predictions for TPP. It inevitably poses a key question with yet more force: why exactly are politicians in TPP nations pushing so hard to ratify a controversial agreement that seems have few quantifiable benefits, and very considerable costs?

Good question.