What Trump and Obama have in common

Donald Trump and Barack Obama would seem to have little binding them together. The billionaire launched his political career questioning whether the first African American president was born in the United States, and has made attacking Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership a leading economic message of his campaign.

While the president has predicted more job-creating exports under the pact, the Republican candidate has blasted it as a “job killer.”

{mosads}Trade is the cudgel Trump is using against Obama ally Hillary Clinton. Early in the first presidential debate, Trump had the former secretary of state on the defensive for her past support of the TPP. “You called it the gold standard,” he said. “And then you heard what I said about it, and all of a sudden you were against it.”

For her part, Clinton has pledged on the pact, “I oppose it now, I’ll oppose it after the election, and I’ll oppose it as president.” But doubts about her sincerity persist. This is not least because top campaign surrogates like Bill Clinton and Obama continue to praise the deal, with the president staking his legacy on a vote in the lame duck session of Congress. Little wonder that labor activists have called on Hillary to get her team on message.

But Trump and Obama, for all their differences, have something in common: an exaggerated sense of the economic importance of the trade deal.  

Thanks to the raft of recent studies, we can put the TPP into perspective. According to estimates by Tufts University researchers critical of the deal, the deal would lead to losses of 0.54 percent of national income and 448,000 jobs. The pact’s proponents at the Peterson Institute, meanwhile, project a gain of up to 0.5 percent of income.

And squarely in the middle, the official U.S. trade agency estimates an income gain of 0.15 percent and an added 128,000 jobs.

Are these impacts big or small? On the one hand, in a nearly $17 trillion U.S. economy, even small percentage changes add up. But on the other, there are policy interventions on the table that would have a much greater impact. Take Clinton’s infrastructure, family leave, and other proposals.

Moody’s Analytics projects they would add 1.7 percent in income and 3.2 million jobs. At the same time, Moody’s estimates similar magnitudes for Trump’s plans, but in the opposite direction. Put in comparative terms, Clinton’s agenda would create 25 times more jobs than the best estimates for the TPP, and Trump’s would destroy eight times more than the worst.

And unlike the trade estimates (which are fully realized only in 2025 to 2032), the campaign boosts and busts would be achieved by 2020.

That the impacts of trade deals are dwarfed by a robust domestic agenda should be sobering to both proponents and critics of the TPP. Obama’s brightest legacy would be extending Democratic rule for another eight years under Clinton. Yet he remains obsessed with a divisive and distracting trade deal whose upside would be tiny in comparison.

Meanwhile, some of Clinton’s Bernie-or-Bust critics from the left are willing to hand the election to Trump because of her seeming lack of consistent rage against the TPP. To be sure, the TPP is a complex agreement going far beyond trade rules: there are principled reasons to oppose it and alternative ways to stay engaged with Asia.

But, at least on job grounds, the amount of attention she has paid to the deal relative to her broader agenda is more than proportionate. There’s no sense telling the American people that trade agreements – in defeat or victory – are going to heal an ailing economy.  

The next administration will have an opportunity to lay out a new deal for the U.S. and global economy. The legislative shoe leather they burn should be better calibrated to the job creation distance America needs to run.

Todd Tucker is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where he writes on international economic law and politics.

 The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.