What is the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal?

Answer 1

The Trans-Pacific Partnership deal is a deal to create a free-trade zone between the US and several Asian and Latin American countries. (US, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru.) The deal would drastically reduce tariffs and increase trade between the United States and these other countries. Additionally, since the TPP cuts out China, it would effectively allow other countries to be equally competitive with China's current lower prices due to lower tariffs on their goods than those of the Chinese.

Even though nearly every economist agrees that free trade deals like the TPP are great for the economy overall, promoting an increased exchange of goods, it will not help all sectors of the economy equally. Trade agreements like TPP tend to increasingly shift blue-collar and unskilled labor outside of the US and into less developed countries like Vietnam, while mostly profiting high-skilled labor which cannot be replicated outside of the US and will be increasingly demanded in less developed country due to lower cost. As a result, people whose livelihoods depend on blue-collar and unskilled labor being plentiful in the US tend to oppose the TPP because of the direct threat to their livelihoods, even though the deal would be a net positive for society overall.