Over at Eyes on Trade, Holly Shulman has a great post about a conference in which several of the Presidential candidates' economic advisers talked about their views on economic issues. She "loosely transcribed" what they said on trade. Here are some snippets (there is more at her full post):
Gary Gensler (HILLARY CLINTON): "Sen. Clinton is very much an internationalist. ... On trade though she has stated and believes in smart trade, but it's not really worked for all Americans. Listening to people, to middle income Americans we should look at every trade agreement and make sure it's working for America."
Austan Goolsbee (BARACK OBAMA): "... if you look at a free trade agreement - if you have never read a free trade agreement I encourage you to go read it - because it is as close to the economists' case for free trade as our tax code is to the economists' case for the ideal tax system. ... And Obama has been trying to get us away from what I call the false choice that either you're for every single thing the administration has done or else you're a protectionist and you're against America's role in the international economy, but neither of those is true."
Kevin Hassett (JOHN MCCAIN): "I think that the trade area is one where you need to be very very careful allowing thoughts like smart trade to leak in, because there's so many politically important interests that are opposed to free trade and the fact is that free trade benefits millions and millions of Americans a little bit at a time and harms specific big money interests like a textile mills and a lot of other examples ... "
