Poor vs Rich

Imagine this.  One night your job that you have worked in for 20+ years since graduating high school was just snatched from you.  No reason due to your performance, just the fact that you are "too expensive."  I'm sure you would get pretty mad and you would have good reason to.  Nothing that happened was in your control.  All that blood, sweat, and tears you put in, gone just like that.  It might be difficult to buy groceries or even pay rent on time, and debt may slowly kill you.

Well, that's what NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement caused.  Seems like a dumb thing to implement right? Taking people's jobs away who are working hard and paying taxes to support the country.  Well it's more complicated than just that.

Now I want to imagine that you are the CEO of some major car manufacturing company.  You would want to make your goods for as cheap as possible to maximize your revenue, thus increasing your profit and, "fattening your wallets."  To do this company's are always looking for new ways to cut down on costs of producing the good, and more times than not making these goods in the United States is not the most cost efficient.  Instead, just importing them could generate you thousands, if not millions of dollars of profit over a span of time.  NAFTA made it infinitely easier for companies to do this by removing the tariffs of goods within North America to promote trading between countries. Now because of this not only can companies fatten their pockets but so can consumers as the price they buy these goods will be much lower now.

As you can see NAFTA is an extremely complicated agreement causing major harm with some people while others will profit of it and create more wealth.  Thus, NAFTA isn't necessarily a good or bad thing, however it lies somewhere in between the two.