Corporate America’s Mysterious Affinity for the Number 700,000
Research Director, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
The Chamber is at it again. As negotiations drag and support flags for the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has come up with a new number to sell the controversial deal to a skeptical Congress and U.S. public: 700,000.
That’s the number of U.S. jobs that the corporate alliance claims could be created by the sweeping pact opposed by a diverse array of members of Congress, small businesses, and labor organizations for its threats to, well, U.S. jobs.
How did the Chamber get this number? They don’t say.
The Chamber blog post proclaiming the six-digit figure simply says it is “based on the methodology and outcomes” of a Peterson Institute study that used outsized assumptions to produce miniscule projections for the TPP’s economic impact. Under the most optimistic scenario the authors could envision, the study projected a 0.13 percent increase in U.S. GDP under the deal –- a fraction of the estimated GDP contribution of the latest version of the iPhone.
But the Peterson Institute study did not project what this tiny economic impact would mean for jobs. It is unclear how the Chamber pulled a jobs number from a study that did not produce a jobs number.
We called them to ask. We were told that no one was there who could answer our question. Multiple calls and emails later, and we still have no response from the Chamber to solve the mystery of the unsubstantiated statistic.
Here’s one theory on the steps the Chamber took to derive its estimate of the TPP’s prospective impact:
- Copy
- Paste
This is not the first time the Chamber has used the number 700,000. Indeed, the Chamber appears to have an uncanny affinity for the number when pushing a retrograde, anti-worker agenda.
When some states raised their minimum wage laws and increased workers’ benefits after the Great Recession, the Chamber commissioned a study finding that such labor laws had cost U.S. jobs. How many? 700,000.
When the Obama administration proposed a tax increase on the wealthy in 2012, the Chamber commissioned a study finding that the proposal would eliminate U.S. jobs…700,000 jobs, to be precise.
Perhaps it should not come as a surprise that the Chamber is using its lucky number once again to push a regressive deal like the TPP.
But hey, if the copy/paste method works…
Maybe we should take a cue from the Chamber and start using whatever numbers we have lying around. Let’s see…how many U.S. jobs have been lost under NAFTA to Mexico alone? Well I’ll be -– the answer is 700,000.
Borrowing a card from the Chamber, we hereby project that the TPP will cost U.S. workers 700,000 jobs.
Okay, obviously it would be ridiculous to pull such projections out of thin air. And let’s hope that’s not what the Chamber is doing to arrive at its unsubstantiated claim.
But without an explanation from the Chamber, we are left to speculate. Maybe they somehow converted Peterson’s miniscule projected GDP gain projection into a much larger jobs gain, errantly ignoring the impact of TPP-spurred inequality. (The Center for Economic and Policy Research found that the likely increase in inequality resulting from the TPP would swamp the small gains projected by the Peterson Institute, spelling a pay cut for 90 percent of U.S. workers.)
Or maybe the Chamber extrapolated a jobs figure from the study’s export calculations, errantly ignoring the impact of TPP-spurred imports. (Any study claiming to evaluate the net impact of trade deals must deal with both sides of the trade equation –- in the same way that exports are associated with job opportunities, imports are associated with lost job opportunities when they outstrip exports, as dramatically seen under existing U.S. pacts.)
In the end, we don’t know how the corporate alliance generated the mystery number behind its TPP cheerleading. Until we see some evidence, we’re going to take the Chamber’s statistic with about 700,000 grains of salt.
***
This has been reposted from Public Citizen.
