This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 28th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

U.S. trade policy takes center stage as Democrats attempt to woo primary voters in Ohio and Texas.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have strained to articulate which candidate dislikes

NAFTA more.

Dan Griswold, the director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies, response.

NAFTA has been an overwhelmingly successful U.S. policy, and let's not forget it came out of the Clinton administration,

Bill Clinton and Al Gore, shepherded through a Democratic Congress.

It went into effect January 1st, 1994. And one of the ironies is, oh, the half dozen years after NAFTA went into effect were probably some of the best years the U.S. economy has experienced ever.

Low inflation, strong growth, robust job creation, rising wages and family income during the 1990s.

Of course, NAFTA wasn't primarily responsible for that but it but it helped

NAFTA was part of the previous Clinton administration's effort to open the US economy

further to trade and globalization. The Uruguay Round

Agreements Act came online about the time of NAFTA. Towards the end of the

Clinton administration, China was ushered into the WTO. You just look at the record of the US economy in the last

14 or 15 years in the what you might call the NAFTA era. 26 million more Americans

working, family income worker compensation which is wages

and benefits up smartly and even the manufacturing sector, which we can expand on in a moment, has done very well in the NAFTA era.

Now Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama seem to be arguing over who dislikes NAFTA more.

You know, it's comical. Here the Democratic, with all the challenges our nation faces in terms of education and terrorism and all that,

they're arguing over who is the strongest opponent of this 14-year-old trade treaty that the

previous Democratic administration got passed.

...