Obama: Americans’ Low Wages ‘Has To Do with Automation, Shifts in the Economy’

‘The American people are right to be concerned with growing inequality’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
MATTHEWS: "Was NAFTA a good deal?" 
OBAMA: "I think NAFTA did a couple of things that were important. It integrated the North American economy. Mexico and Canada are important trading partners." 
MATTHEWS: "Right." 
OBAMA: "We sell a lot of stuff to them. They sell a lot of stuff to us. The problem with NAFTA that I identified when I was running for Senate long before I was in the Oval Office was the labor agreements and the environmental agreements were in a side letter. They weren't enforceable the same way that the business provisions were in the document and you could actually penalize somebody if they violated them. That's fixed in the trade deal that we're looking at here. Here's the larger point that I want to make a point. The American people are right to be concerned with growing inequality. American workers write that they haven't seen their wages go up in a couple of decades even though the economy has grown significantly, and so I understand the anxieties that people feel, and some of that has to do with globalization. A lot more of it actually has to do with automation and just shifts in the economy away from manufacturing towards services. The thing is though that if -- if we are going to capture the future, then we've got to open up markets to the kinds of things that we're really good at, that can't be duplicated overseas. We're good an interovation. We're good at services. We can create things that other countries can't create. We're not going to be able to compete for low-wage manufacturing jobs anymore. That ship has sailed. What we can do is compete for the high end where we're adding value, and the small companies that are represented by the doctor and by Debby, where it's I.T., it's talent, it's innovation, that's the kind of stuff that we can sell all around the world, and by the way, we're still doing good on manufacturing."

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