PBS Democratic Debate: Live Coverage

Clinton’s callout to coal country makes me wonder whether the moderators will ask about President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court issued an order preventing the Obama administration from taking steps to enact or enforce the CPP pending a decision on a court challenge to the plan filed by 29 states and numerous industry groups and stakeholders. The CPP is a cornerstone of President Obama’s climate policy and provides many of the emissions reductions that the administration pledged the Paris climate conference in December. An overturning of the CPP could pull the rug out from under the Paris treaty, much like how the 1997 Byrd-Hagel resolution weakened the Kyoto Protocol.

Sanders is definitely right about the disappearance of manufacturing jobs, and of the erosion of wages in those jobs. And he is likely right that global competition has played a significant role in that decline. Whether trade has been bad for less-educated workers overall is a harder question. Economists broadly agree that trade, like immigration, is good for the economy as a whole. But a policy that helps the economy can still be bad for individual workers.