Nope, Mr. President, Mexico Wouldn't Pay For Wall Under New NAFTA
Forbes (16/01/2019) - There's one problem with President Trump's latest suggestion regarding how Mexico will pay for his proposed border wall.
He's wrong, almost certainly wrong.
Not only that, if anything, the proposed United States Mexico Canada Free Trade Agreement will exacerbate what the president often laments: a U.S. trade deficit, in this case with our southern neighbor.
That the president would suggest that USMCA would generate the revenue from Mexico to pay for a wall points to one of two possibilities: Either he and his advisers fail to understand how trade, particularly trade at the border, occurs or they are intentionally trying to mislead anyone within ear shot.
In case you have been under a rock the last two years, President Trump has repeatedly said not only that the United States would build a border wall, first as a candidate and repeatedly as president, but that Mexico would pay for it. His demand is at the heart of the longest U.S. government shutdown in history, which is ongoing. Mexico has repeatedly scoffed at the notion.
The starting point to understanding why Mexico wouldn't pay for a wall, should the new free trade agreement gain approval, is that since the still-in-effect North America Free Trade Agreement went into effect in the early 1990s, most goods have crossed the border between Mexico and the United States without tariffs. (The same, of course, holds true for U.S. and Mexico trade with Canada.)