Since the beginning of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has railed against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as being a bad deal for working Americans. He promised that if he was elected, he would renegotiate NAFTA and secure a “much better deal for all Americans.”

So it’s not surprising that earlier this week, the leader of a prosperous country engaged in NAFTA renegotiations demanded changes to increase workers’ leverage, provide a bulwark against downward wage pressure, and prevent his country’s manufacturing sector from being undercut by weak labor standards. But was this leader Donald Trump? Nope. It was Justin Trudeau of Canada.

Even more striking, the reported change that Trudeau’s government has requested to stem downward pressure on Canadian wages is one that beefs up American labor standards. Yes, the low-wage, low-standard country that Trudeau’s government is correctly concerned about as they renegotiate NAFTA is the United States.

The requested change is ambitious: Trudeau’s government wants an end to so-called “right to work” (RTW) laws in American states. This would clearly be good for American workers. In a nutshell, “right to work” laws have nothing to do with helping people find work—instead they simply ban contracts requiring that workers benefiting from labor union representation pay their fair share for this representation. This ban makes it extraordinarily difficult for workers to join together and form unions in RTW states. As a result, these states have substantially fewer union members and less collective bargaining. The economic evidence shows that RTW laws do not boost employment or economic growth, but do suppress wages.

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Tomorrow the Senate Banking Committee will vote on the first Trump administration nominee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Randal Quarles. As we’ve noted again and again in recent years, members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which include Fed governors, have extraordinary power over American economic policy. A primary job for the FOMC is balancing the two prongs of the Fed’s “dual mandate”—the pursuit of maximum employment consistent with stability of prices (or at least stability of inflation). For too many years over recent decades the Fed has privileged avoiding any outbreak of above-target inflation over the need to pursue maximum employment and keep labor markets tight. This failure to target and achieve genuine full employment has been a key driver in the rise of income inequality and the failure of wages for the vast majority to meaningfully outpace inflation. Currently, this debate over full employment and the dual mandate centers over concerns that the Fed may have begun raising short-term interest rates too early and too rapidly, threatening to drag on the pace of economic recovery and progress in reducing unemployment.

Quarles has made it clear that he does not think that recent interest rate increases have proceeded too rapidly. In fact, he has made a conventionally conservative mistake in declaring that low interest rates are a “threat to financial stability.” This outlook should not come as a huge surprise. A key reason why the Fed in recent decades has privileged extreme inflation control over tight labor markets has been because the financial sector and wealth holders are extremely averse to inflation surprises. The financial sector dominates governance of the regional Federal Reserve banks, which supply 5/12ths of the votes of the FOMC. Quarles’ arguments against efforts to aggressively pursue genuine full employment are fully consistent with his background as a self-described “Wall Street lawyer.”

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The saying goes that even a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day. This is a pretty good description of the Trump administration’s approach to trade policy: their analysis and motivations are almost never right, yet they occasionally hit on a decent idea. But then they move quickly off of it. This is illustrated perfectly in their recent moves regarding the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS).

News reports suggest that the Trump administration is preparing to withdraw from KORUS. The motivation for this seems more driven by Trump pique that the South Korean government is not rubber-stamping his preferred policy stance on the current tensions in the Korean peninsula, rather than on any coherent economic analysis.

Yet, it’s true that on pure economics, KORUS should be seen as a failure. The KORUS deal, approved in 2011, was supposed to result in rising U.S. exports. However, U.S. exports to Korea actually fell $1.2 billion between 2011 and 2016, while imports from South Korea soared—increasing the bilateral trade deficit by $14.4 billion and eliminating more than 95,000 jobs in the first three years alone.

The glaring omission in KORUS was failure to include enforceable provisions on currency policy. Korea is a well-known currency manipulator, and it also has the fourth largest current account trade surplus (the broadest measure of trade in goods, services, and income) in the world. Ending Korean currency manipulation and revaluing the won is the surest way to increase U.S. exports and stop the surge in Korean imports in the United States, demonstrating the value of this strategy for rebalance overall U.S. trade and helping to rebuild U.S. manufacturing. Recent estimates suggest that rebalancing U.S. trade will require Korea to revalue the won by at least 32.7 percent.

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This morning Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump administration will “wind down,” and in six months, end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a Department of Homeland Security initiative put in place in 2012 that temporarily deferred the deportation of approximately 800,000 young immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. DACA has been an unqualified success and has benefited not only the DACA recipients themselves, but also the country and the economy.

The young immigrants who met the requirements and passed the necessary background checks for DACA were promised by the federal government that they would not be removed from the United States for two years at a time, as long as they kept applying to renew, kept a clean criminal record, and were either enrolled in school or graduated, or serving in the military or honorably discharged. Because of these requirements, we know that nearly all of the recipients are deeply integrated into their local American communities and labor markets.

Along with protection from removal, DACA recipients are entitled to receive an employment authorization document (EAD), allowing them to be employed in the United States legally, along with certain other benefits. More than 100 legal experts and 20 state attorneys general have recently argued that DACA is a lawful use of the executive branch’s prosecutorial discretion, and as I have written before, the granting of an EAD to deferred action recipients is clearly authorized by statute. Together this means that eliminating DACA is entirely a political decision and not a legal one. The impact of this political decision is significant: 800,000 young immigrants—many of whom have never known another country except when they were small children—will become instantly deportable and lose the ability to work legally and contribute to the United States, and will be effectively left without labor rights and employment law protections in the workplace.

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On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced a “review and immediate stay” of the EEO-1 pay data collection rule, which was an Obama-era rule issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The rule would have required large companies (with 100 or more employees) to confidentially report to the EEOC information about what they pay their employees by job category, sex, race, and ethnicity. Pay transparency is key in leveling the playing field in order to eliminate employer discrimination.

This move is just another example of how the Trump administration’s campaign rhetoric on supporting working people has been followed by actions that hurt them at every turn. Further, this decision runs counter to what the research shows—inequities have gotten worse, not better. Even among workers with the same level of education and work experience, black-white wage gaps are larger today than nearly 40 years ago and gender pay disparities have remained essentially unchanged for at least 15 years. In both cases, discrimination has been shown to be a major factor in the persistence of those gaps.

As my colleague Marni von Wilpert notes, by staying the equal pay data rule, the Trump administration is making it harder for employers and federal agencies to identify pay disparities and root out employment discrimination—and it will make it more difficult for working people to know when they are being discriminated against. When this rule was first announced, former EEOC Chair Jenny R. Yang stated, “Collecting pay data is a significant step forward in addressing discriminatory pay practices. This information will assist employers in evaluating their pay practices to prevent pay discrimination and strengthen enforcement of our federal anti-discrimination laws.” By staying this rule, the Trump administration has shown that it does not value equal pay for equal work.

This post originally appeared on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Medium page.

This week, New York Magazine and ProPublica published a scathing article by Alec MacGillis titled, “Is anyone home at HUD?”. Multiple sources — current and former, career, and political staff — described a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in disarray, with severe lack of direction from a Secretary who has said he believes poverty is a mindset. Here, Richard Rothstein digs into the socio-economic conditions that lead to poverty for many low-income children, which policymakers like Secretary Carson would do well to consider.

Ben Carson, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told an interviewer recently that poverty results from “the wrong mindset:” low-income persons with strong motivation can escape poverty while those with negative attitudes remain poor.

His own life story seems to illustrate this. Poor children with ambition and self-discipline can occasionally climb the socioeconomic ladder. Luck figures, too, but a child must be on the lookout for it to benefit. Children expecting defeat may never seize opportunities within reach.

Yet as a scientist, Dr. Carson should realize that it’s always dangerous to jump from anecdotes about exceptional cases to generalizations about entire groups. Every human condition has variability. Only some children in Flint got lead poisoning, although all drank the same poisoned water. Even native intelligence is distributed: in any demographic group, some have above average I.Q.s, some are below it, and most are average, around 100.

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During a town hall on Monday, House Speaker Paul Ryan trotted out a standard and misleading talking point, claiming that the international competitiveness of U.S. corporations is damaged by an allegedly too-high corporate income tax rate.

“I was just meeting with a father/son business in—I was doing office hours in Janesville today. I met with a father/son business in—down in south central Wisconsin. I don’t want to tell their names because I don’t want to, you know, get them grief. But down in Genoa City, they have an electricity business. They make electrical parts for Snap-on and other companies.

Their biggest competitor is Canada, a company in Canada. Their tax rate—they’re a corporation, small business, 35 percent. You know what the Canadian tax rate is? Fifteen percent. Eight out of 10 businesses in America file their taxes as people, as individuals. We call them, like, Subchapter S corporations, LLCs. Their top effective tax rate is 44.6 percent. Canadians are at 15 percent. The Irish at 12.5 percent. China, 25 percent.”

As I noted a couple weeks ago, the most common version of this talking point just compares the statutory U.S. corporate tax rate to the statutory corporate rate in other countries. This is already awfully misleading because what corporations actually pay (their effective rate) is far less than the 35 percent statutory rate, thanks to a corporate tax code riddled with loopholes. It’s hard to come up with an exact number, but studies have found effective federal corporate tax rates ranging between 12.5 and 19.4 percent—a far cry from 35 percent.

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The first round of the Trump administration’s NAFTA renegotiations began in Washington wrapped up on Saturday. The negotiators will meet again in September in Mexico City and then again in October in Canada. The United States has not yet proposed any specific measures on important issues such as labor rights, currency manipulation, or rules of origin. By all accounts, these negotiations are more likely to hurt than help most working Americans, who would be better served by efforts to target countries with large, global trade surpluses such as China, the European Union (EU) and Japan. Rather than tinkering around the edges of NAFTA, the United States should begin a campaign to realign the U.S. dollar and rebalance global trade.

Over its first 20 years, growing trade deficits with Mexico and Canada from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) eliminated 850,000 U.S. jobs, most of them in manufacturing. (American workers suffered far more after China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, including 3.4 million jobs lost through 2015 alone, due to growing trade deficits with that country.) And trade deficits and job losses are just the tip of the iceberg of the devastation wreaked by bad trade deals, which have also driven down the wages of all 100 million American workers without a college degree, who have suffered losses of just under $2,000 per year for each median wage, full-time worker. Roughly $200 billion per year is being taken from the pockets of working people and middle class families, because the super-rich and huge corporations have been able to game the system at their expense.

NAFTA has created the economic equivalent of a 14-lane freeway to Mexico, paving the way for the outsourcing of jobs and factories to Mexico. In the past twenty years, the U.S. has lost more than 87,000 factories (manufacturing establishments), wiping out nearly one-third of U.S. manufacturing production capacity. Tweaking NAFTA around the edges is not going to change those dynamics. As EPI founder Jeff Faux recently explained, NAFTA created “radical new rules for trade…that shifted the benefits of expanding trade to investors and the costs to workers.” The system that created this deal to benefit rich executives and multinational companies is still in place and, if anything, tilts even further in their interest in an administration led by former Goldman Sachs executives Gary Cohn (Trump’s chief economic advisor) and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

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