Why Obama Says 'Don't Read' Liberal Huffington Post, or His Own Blog on Middle-Class Economics
The Huffington Post explored why President Obama told House Democrats this week not to read the liberal media outlet, which blasted his trade agenda. Obama's advice came just before his own blog post on his blueprint for middle-class economics went up on the same site.
"The fact that president Obama's got so worked up over analysis of the HuffPost criticizing his trade agenda, I think that it says something," HuffPost Live quoted Global Trade Watch research director Ben Beachy as saying Friday. "I think what it says is Obama is having to reckon with the difficult reality that his trade agenda directly conflicts with and undermines his stated middle class economics agenda."
HuffPost says Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership deal would undermine his commitment to the middle class.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
"On Monday, I will present Congress with my budget, a plan for bringing middle-class economics into the 21st Century," Obama writes on his blog on HuffPost, which went up Thursday, hours after he told House Democrats to avoid reading the left-leaning news site.
Beachy disagreed that the TPP deal would result in more jobs, and argued it could instead lead to a lower pay for workers who earn less than $80,000.
The deal would add "more offshoring incentives, which means a loss of manufacturing jobs," Beachy said. "Since NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], nearly 5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. Workers that are displaced have had to take pay cuts working retail, in restaurants, and that is increasing inequality ... The increasing inequality would outweigh any tiny economic gains for the median worker, and nine out of 10 of us … would actually get a pay cut from the TPP," he said.
HuffPost Washington Bureau Chief Ryan Grim said when the site, for instance, is so critical of Wall Street policy or somebody like economist Larry Summers or investment banker Antonio Weiss, Obama "knows that we're coming from a place of sympathy with the goals of expanding opportunity, of trying to reduce poverty." He added, "You're generally finding agreements about the ends [but not the means]."
"In an op-ed earlier this month, Secretary of State John F. Kerry claimed, "Estimates are that the TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership] could provide $77 billion a year in real income and support 650,000 new jobs in the U.S. alone."
The Washington Post's Fact Checker columnist Glenn Kessler advised readers against believing in the claim.
"Our advice remains: be wary whenever a politician claims a policy will yield bountiful jobs. In this case, the correct number is zero (in the long run), not 650,000, according to the very study used to calculate this number. Administration officials earn Four Pinocchios for their fishy math."
