I'm unconvinced by this article for a number of reasons.<p>The significance placed on trade deficits always struck me as somewhat misguided so the author's uncritical focus on this crude metric is off putting. In aggregate, inward and outward flows have to match by definition. If an American company builds and sells a car to a foreigner this reduces the US deficit but if it builds and sells a house to a foreigner, then this has the effect of increasing it. So in the modern world, running a trade deficit just means you are selling more things like houses than cars.<p>If running a trade deficit was impoverishing, then you'd imagine that the two lists of countries with the biggest trade deficits and surpluses (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_current_account_balance" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_current_a...</a> ) would be dominated by the poorest and richest countries respectively. But they are not - it just depends on the economic specialities of the countries.<p>Also I am suspicious of anyone who uses a dismissive phrase like "so called experts" as part of their argument. In my experience, this generally is a strong signal that the author has a very superficial understanding of the subject. Not that I claim any expertise in the area.
"As it stands, almost nothing has been done in this era of trade liberalization to reduce the barriers protecting our most highly paid professionals."<p>tl;dr Dean Baker wants to respond to the impoverishment of manufacturing workers by impoverishing professional service workers.<p>"In generating savings from freer trade in the labor of doctors and lawyers and so on, we would also be promoting equality"<p>People like him are why Trump is now in power.
Well, it's certainly not blameless.<p>Edit: It also seems common to misplace fault in many directions while ignoring the influence of globalization completely.