John McCain made a quick stop in Chicago yesterday to speak to the National Restaurant Association members.  He promised the group that they would fare better under his administration than under either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton administration.
“Your plans for growth and their plans for taxes are going to be hard to square, because you can’t raise taxes by a trillion dollars without hurting American workers,” said McCain.

McCain singled out Obama specifically for his expressed views on trade.  McCain insisted that criticizing U.S. trade policy as Obama has done “plays on fears of foreign trade” marking Obama as the politician who practices “old-style politics.”  At the same time, Senator McCain did acknowledge that global trade comes at a cost and vowed to expand and improve federal aid for displaced workers.

McCain said U.S. exports and trade agreements create jobs and income that otherwise would not exist.  He also said that “Senator Obama has a habit of talking down the value of our exports and trade agreements. He even proposed a unilateral re-negotiation of NAFTA - our agreement with Canada and Mexico that accounts for 33 percent of American exports, and 17 billion dollars’ worth of exports last year just for Illinois.”

Surely, Senator McCain realizes that exports are only one half of the trade story and no serious discussion can omit the fact that we import much more from our trading partners, including NAFTA countries, than we sell to them.  The U.S. Census Bureau indicates that in 2007 alone our trade deficit with Canada and Mexico was almost $139 billion.  Our trade deficit with China was nearly twice that, at over $256 billion.

Omitting half the truth, Senator McCain?  That certainly sounds like the “old-style politics” to us.

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