As the Trans Pacific Partnership steams toward a senate vote, opposition has been coming from many quarters. This opposition needs to unite with a message that is coherent. However, that has been hard to do since no one except a few negotiators have any idea what is in the treaty. What little that has been leaked gives us a hint that the treaty is not built with the American people in mind.

Here is Alan Grayson from the new website tradetreachery.com with a 9 minute discourse on the known problems with the top:

A short story on the Buffet Trade Plan can be read here.

Here is a short excerpt that sums it up:

The Buffet Plan

Buffet proposed a simple plan to balance our trade. The government could issue “Import Certificates (ICs) to all U.S. exporters in an amount equal to the dollar value of their exports.” The number of import certificates determines the level of trade imbalance or balance that we allow.

Each exporter would, in turn, sell the ICs to parties–either exporters abroad or importers here–wanting to get goods into the U.S. To import $1 million of goods, for example, an importer would need ICs that were the byproduct of $1 million of exports. The inevitable result: trade balance.

The idea was sort of like cap-and-trade. Exporters would get a certificate for the value of their exports. The certificates allow anyone holding them to import that dollar amount of goods or services. So selling these certificates would mean extra cash to exporters, and would help them modernize factories, pay specialists and the other things needed to revive our in-country industries. Or the extra cash would let them sell for less, which would counter currency manipulation and other subsidies that other countries provide to their exporters.

There are a number of pluses and minuses, and Buffett goes on to list some of the negative effects of balancing trade. For one thing, prices would necessarily go up. But, of course, jobs and wage gains would return to our economy.