Here's Why North Carolina Keeps Getting Poorer

[xchrom]

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-north-carolina-has-a-poverty-problem-2014-8


An old movie theater in Charlotte

***SNIP

For one thing, Nichol says, North Carolina has felt the impact of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement more than potentially any other state in the nation. NAFTA allows free trade between Mexico, Canada, and the U.S., and opponents of the agreement believed it would lead to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs as well as plummeting wages, according to Public Citizen. Those who supported the agreement believed it would increase the standard of living in America.

As a result of NAFTA, Nichol says, the state lost massive numbers of manufacturing, agricultural, and tobacco-related jobs, and North Carolinians were forced into structural unemployment.

"Many folks lost their jobs in that period," Nichol said. "They either didn't get successful replacements or frequently got other jobs but they had dramatically diminished salaries. That's had a big impact on poverty levels in North Carolina."

The second part of that double-whammy came in the form of the housing collapse and the great recession in 2008, which happened right as North Carolina was beginning to turn the corner after the NAFTA fallout.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-north-carolina-has-a-poverty-problem-2014-8#ixzz3ApaHrDj7



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-north-carolina-has-a-poverty-problem-2014-8#ixzz3ApZzwP2g

[Enthusiast]

1. Sorry.

I do not believe those who supported the agreement believed it would increase the standard of living in America. They knew it would increase the bottom line.

They didn't give one single fuck about the rest. And this same bunch? They're still pushing these destructive free trade deals.

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[n2doc]

6. Yep

The one thing that was guaranteed about NAFTA was that American manufacturing jobs would be lost. It was the central idea.

[Laelth]

2. k&r for the truth, however depressing it may be. n/t

-Laelth

[ProdigalJunkMail]

3. NAFTA killed huge portions of NC...

I was living their when NAFTA began to take effect. the outcome should haunt the future of all 'free-trade' agreements with countries whose wages are FAR below those of the USA.

sP

[Lee-Lee]

4. Yes indeed. I grew up in a textile town surrounded by tobacco towns

My dad worked his whole life after he left the Navy in textiles, and still does some work now helping owners of older equipment who still use it keep it going.

He did maintenance on the machines, and even before NAFTA he found himself more and more often being paid for jobs that consisted to going in and taking the machines apart to either be sent overseas or scrapped.

He started buying all the small, often broken parts from all the ones that were headed to scrap, for a while he and a partner had a huge warehouse of textile parts, and they spent a lot of days helping owners of plants using those machines keep them going, especially after the manufacturers of the machines went under or quit supporting the older stuff. He made really good money while helping American companies keep going a bit longer. There are still a few here in the USA using the old equipment, but not nearly as many.

I dated a guy from a town that lived on tobacco farming right as it really went down. What was a huge success story of government crop limits and market control keeping prices high where farmers did really well turned in a few short years to farmers forced into growing crops not nearly as profitable and with far less protection- here in NC they limited how much average anyone could grow tobacco on, so everyone made money. Soybeans are left to a cutthroat market.

[Katashi_itto]

5. Thanks Clinton.

At least Hillary will be back with TPP to finish the job on the rest of the country.

[ColesCountyDem]

7. NAFTA did the same thing to southern Illinois.

Southern Illinois has been the poorest part of the state for well over 100 years, and it's a virtual certainty that any bad economic news will either have visited southern Illinois prior to its widespread impact or will visit southern Illinois in the first 'wave'.

Just as southern Illinois was beginning to recover from the economic devastation wrought on the coal industry by the EPA and various legislation aimed at air- and water quality in the '80s and '90s, NAFTA roared through and wiped out HUGE numbers of relatively high-wage, high-benefit, manufacturing jobs.

It's not that no one saw NAFTA for the economic evil that it promised to be and is, it's that not enough people CARED, not even Democrats. NAFTA is what has turned this once reliably 'blue' part of the state a very deep maroon.

[betterdemsonly]

8. Businessmen are hitten rock bottom now

and are planning on replacing all workers with robots.