Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Explainer: What you should know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade accord
Explainer: What you should know about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade accord
Dec 7, 2025 7:39 PM

In the recent presidential debate, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton disagreed on nearly everything. But there is one thing they both oppose: the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Here is what you should know about the agreement and why it matters in the election.

What is the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

Five years in the making, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a trade agreement between the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam, Chile, Brunei, Singapore, and New Zealand. The twelve countries in this prise roughly 40 percent of global G.D.P. and one-third of world trade.

The purpose of the agreement, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, is to “enhance trade and investment among the TPP partner countries, promote innovation, economic growth and development, and support the creation and retention of jobs.” The agreement could create a new single market for goods and services between these countries, similar to what exists between European countries.

What exactly is a trade agreement?

A trade agreement is a treaty between two or more countries that reduces or eliminates barriers to free trade, such as taxes, tariffs, quotas, or trade restrictions. Three of the mon types of trade agreements the U.S. is involved with are Free Trade Agreements (FTAs), Trade and Investment Framework Agreement (TIFAs), and Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs).

The United States has FTAs in effect with 20 countries. These tend to be expansions or additions to other agreements, such as World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement. TIFAs provide frameworks for governments to discuss and resolve trade and investment issues at an early stage while BITs help protect private investment, develop market-oriented policies in partner countries, and promote U.S. exports.

Which goods and services are affected?

Almost everything. Tariffs will be immediately eliminated or reduced on nearly all agricultural products, industrial goods, and most textiles and clothing.

TPP will also provide mutual recognition of many regulations, including an exclusivity period for biologic drugs, which are derived from living organisms, and patent protection for pharmaceuticals.

What are the arguments in favor of TPP?

Some of the benefits outlined by the Obama administration are:

By eliminating over 18,000 taxes—in the form of tariffs—that various countries put on Made-in-America products, TPP makes sure our farmers, ranchers, manufacturers, and small businesses pete—and win—in some of the fastest-growing markets in the world. With more than 95 percent of the world’s consumers living outside our borders, TPP will significantly expand the export of Made-in-America goods and services and support American jobs.

Free trade also tends to increase economic growth, reduces global poverty and hunger, and leads to better treatment of the environment.

Free trade also has national security implications. As Nobel-winning economist Thomas Schelling said, “Trade policy can be civilized or disorderly, US trade policies can antagonize governments, generate resentment in populations, hurt economies, influence the tenure of governments, even provoke hostilities . . . Trade is what most of international relations are about. For that reason trade policy is national security policy.”

What are the arguments against TPP?

The main opposition to the es from the political left (though, because of the Trump, they are joined by the populist right). For example, labor organizations such as the AFL-CIO argue that it will lead to additional outsourcing of U.S. jobs. Communications Workers of America President Chris Shelton called the pact “a bad deal for working families munities.”

Some large corporation also oppose the treaty. According to Bloomberg Business, Ford Motor Co. told Congress not to approve the agreement because it “fails to adequately address currency manipulation overseas, which may tip the playing field.”

What happens next?

Before the agreement can take effect a majority of Congress must also implement legislation to bring U.S. laws pliance with the TPP agreement.

Will Congress approve TPP?

It’s too soon to tell. Although this is a legacy-making issue for President Obama, many in his own party are vehemently opposed to the deal. Last monthSenate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hinted that the Senate wouldn’t be taking up the issue until next year.“The current agreement, the Trans-Pacific [Partnership], which has some serious flaws, will not be acted upon this year,” said McConnell.

Why should Christians care about TPP?

Even if the political left is right about the effect on labor within the U.S., these types of trade agreements tend to benefit our poorest neighbors across the globe. As Walter Russell Mead says,

These deals allow desperately poor people in other countries to escape lives of rural poverty, tenant farming, or utter urban destitution for factory jobs. And however poorly paid these jobs may initially be, and however polluting and dangerous the factories may be, they do give the global poor a chance to get a foot on the bottom rung of the economic ladder.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
You Can’t Separate Stewardship from Economics
As Christians continue toturn their attentionto the intersection of faith and work, it can be easy to dwell on such matters onlyinsofar as theyapplyto ourindividual lives. What is our purpose, ourvocation, and our value? How does God view our work, and how ought we to render it back tohim? What is the source ofour economic action? These questions are important, butthe answers will inevitably point us to a more public (and for some, controversial) context filled with profound questions of...
Federal Contractors Now Subject To Anti-Human Trafficking Laws
As of March 2, panies that contract with the U.S. federal government ply with laws aimed at curbing labor trafficking. According to JDSupra, these laws impact contractors and sub-contractors, a group that includes over 300,000 businesses and organizations. Such organizations will now be required to Prevent severe forms of trafficking and forced labor by taking concrete, preventive steps to ensure employees do not engage in trafficking-related activities.Cooperate with, and provide access to, enforcement agencies pliance with anti-trafficking and forced labor...
Why Government Money Alone Can’t Fix Poor Schools
The largest initiative bat poverty by funding public schools has occurred in Camden, New Jersey, the poorest small city in America. New Jersey spends about 60 percent more on education per pupil than the national average according to 2012 census figures, or about $19,000 in 2013. In Camden, per pupil spending was more than $25,000 in 2013, making it one of the highest spending districts in the nation. But as notes, all that extra money hasn’t changed the fact that...
Is Putin’s Russia Funding the Religious Left’s War on Fossil Fuels?
For all of their wailing and gnashing of teeth about transparency, some in the American progressive movement certainly turn a blind eye toward the funding of their own pet causes. Last week, The Washington Free Beacon’s Lachlan Markay reported that millions of dollars from unknown sources have been passed through pany in Bermuda and transferred to American nonprofits who oppose hydraulic fracturing and, it seems, any industry involved with fossil fuels. Among these nonprofits are several established groups of religious...
Thomas Merton on Marxism and Monasticism
A friend of mine recently shared this short clip of Thomas Merton’s last lecture. He has some interesting things to say munism and monasticism, as well as what is clearly a sly promo for Coca-Cola at the end. “From now on, brothers, everybody stands on his own feet.” This would be a great summary statement of what the monastic vow of poverty actually meant to most monks, historically. With regards to monasteries being the only places that have ever fulfilled...
The Only Solution to World Poverty
One of the primary assumptions of the modern age is that all choices are multiple choice. Whether we are choosing the color of the car we drive, the occupation that we will work, or the lifestyle we will live, choice is the dominate paradigm. While the expansion of choices has, in many ways, expanded human flourishing, it has also led, in some areas, to a false belief that merely wanting something to be multiple choice will make it so. But...
The 7 Best Super Bowl Commercials About Vocation and Stewardship
Contrary to the trite assertion made every year by people who don’t know how to appreciate football, it is not really true that mercials the best thing about the Super Bowl (at least not always). Sure, it seems that way because the television viewer is mercials than actual game play (in an average game, theratio mercials to playing time is seven to one). The reality, however, is that most of mercials aren’t all that memorable. Only a few stand out...
How Puritans Became Capitalists
In his book,Heavenly Merchandize, Mark Valeri, professor of church history at Union Presbyterian Seminary, finds that the American economy as we know it emerged from aseries of important shifts in the views of Puritan ministers: IDEAS:You’re saying that the market didn’t rise at the expense of religion, but was enabled by it? VALERI:You need to have a change in your basic understanding of how or where God works in the world before you can envision different economic behaviors as morally...
Why Keep Funding Ineffective Government Programs?
Head Start doesn’t work. More people than ever are now on food stamps. Medicaid is staggering under the weight of its own bloat. Why are we continuing to fund bad programs? This is what Stephen M. Krason is asking. Such programs keep expanding: There has been a sharp increase in the food-stamp and Children’s Health Insurance programs. Obama has proposed more federal funding for Head Start and pre-school education generally, job training for laid-off workers, and Medicaid. In fact, the...
Fertility Industry: Money, Not Science
Wanting a baby and not being able to have one is one of the worst feelings is the world; I know firsthand. It puts a person in a vulnerable and sometimes desperate state of mind, not to mention the bundle of emotions one must deal with. The fertility industry knows this, and preys on it. Jennifer Lahl also knows this; she is the founder and president of theCenter for Bioethics and Culture. She wants to call out the fertility industry...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved