It seems that the editors at The Washington Post are very concerned, The End of Globalization? The last three years the global economy has grown more than international trade. The last time this happened was in 1985. Oh. My. God! What are we going to do? I just looked outside and there are no flames as of yet, but clearly it is just a matter of time because the world is on fire. I’m sure that Thomas Friedman is hiding under his bed. How can we possibly survive without ever increasing international trade?! If people are buying more things locally, it must be a sign of Armageddon.

Dean Baker responded, The Trans-Pacific Partnership, International Trade, and Arithmetic Problems at The Washington Post. Because this is all about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). All our worries will supposedly be over if only we get the TPP — at least until the next trade agreement comes up. But as Baker noted, “The TPP actually will not do much to reduce trade barriers, since the barriers to trade among the countries in the pact are already low in almost all cases.” Like most trade deals these days, it doesn’t have that much to do with trade in a general sense and it has nothing to do with “free trade.”

This reminds me of an article that Noah Smith wrote a few months back, Free-Market Ideology and the Burden of Proof. It was about tax cuts and regulation reductions and their effects on the economy. He said basically, “Let’s assume that Reagan’s changes really helped the economy in the 1980s; isn’t it likely that making taxes even lower and getting rid of even more regulation will have — at best — a far smaller effect on the economy?” I feel the same way about trade agreements: getting rid of trade barriers in the past was doubtless a good idea. But are we really likely to gain much now? Reducing tariffs from 50% to 5% was a much bigger deal than reducing them from 5% to 0%.

And that’s why when we look at the new trade deals they don’t seem to have much to do with their stated intent. Baker has done everything but run through the streets banging pots to bring attention to this. We aren’t talking “free trade” when “one of the main thrusts of the deal is to increase patent and copyright protections.” That’s not about bringing prices down for consumers — quite the opposite, actually. That’s about providing certain industries with economic protection — industries that have a lot of political power.

There is a cargo cult aspect to this too. Thomas Friedman famously said, “I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.” That’s true of most of the trade deal boosters who don’t have a direct stake in the matter: trade deals helped the economy in the past so they must always be good under all conditions. And in the case of Friedman: the deal didn’t even have to be about free trade — it just had to claim to be about it.

William Jennings Bryan once spoke about how the financial types wanted to “crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Well, now it is a cross of free trade. And the people advocating it today are no more well informed than the gold standard types were then.

It is well known (among liberals at least), that the economy has done much better under Democratic administrations than under Republicans — going back to World War II. And the difference is big: it’s almost double in terms of GDP growth. But I’ve always been skeptical about the claim. While it is certainly true, it isn’t based upon a lot of data — just 12 presidencies. And besides, I tended to think that the president doesn’t have that big an effect on the economy. But then I read Mark Thoma in The Fiscal Times, The Political Party of the President Matters for the Economy.

Thoma is a liberal, but he’s no bomb thrower. He’s a very careful economist. If it had been just anyone writing such an article, I probably would have passed it by. But instead, I read it, and he makes a very compelling case. He goes through the many ways that presidents do, in fact, effect the economy. It wasn’t all new to me, but it I wasn’t thinking too clearly even about the stuff that I knew. One thing that did surprise me is that because people don’t stay on the Federal Reserve board for very long, both George W Bush and Obama were able to fill it with all their own people. That matters. As Thomas put it, if we had had a Republican in the White House “does anyone doubt that policy would have been much different? Would interest rates still be at the lower bound? Would the Fed’s balance sheet be as large?”

The more obvious way the president matters is in fiscal policy. Democrats approach recessions in ways that actually help: tax cuts for the poor and middle classes; extended unemployment insurance; infrastructure spending. Republicans approach recessions the way they do everything: tax cuts for the rich. Even though “there’s little evidence that cutting taxes on the wealthy spurs economic growth, particularly in a severe recession when the tax reductions mostly end up as idle savings.” Basically, a recession is just an excuse for Republicans to do what they want to do anyway.

What’s more, individuals and businesses are more confident about the economic outlook when the Democrats are in charge. So they spend and invest more. That, I must say, is a bit of a shock to me. If the people know that the economy will do better under the Democrats, why do they ever vote for the Republicans? I understand that turnout is an issue. But if even businesses know it, why hasn’t there been a huge amount of pressure on the Republican Party to change its economic policies?

When put this way, it all seems so clear. The Republicans really are all about the shock doctrine: they don’t care about doing what is best for the economy; they have a set of things they want to do — which they always want to do — and that is what they do. It would be like going to a dentist who only knows how to pull teeth. Before long, you would have no teeth.

If you want to do a little low key activism, you might discuss this issue with people who aren’t much into politics. You don’t have to mention policies. You just have to talk about how they feel about the economy under Democrats and Republicans. Because the last time the economy did reasonably well under a Republican was under Reagan — 30 years ago. And all the Republican Party has offered since are the same policies, only more so. And it hasn’t worked. And it isn’t intended to. It is intended to just take more money away from you and me and give it to the rich.