A bad deal for whom? Unions? Poorly run companies? Let's hear your case. Please explain how getting cheaper oil from Canada or cheaper tomatoes from Mexico or cheaper textiles from Honduras is a bad deal. Also, explain how increasing exports to Mexico or Canada is also a bad deal. Inquiring minds want to know.
http://economyincrisis.org/content/why-nafta-is-bad-for-the-u-s
Current trade deficit with Mexico ...$91 billion
I wonder why I bother posting things people don't read.
This doesn't involve Mexico.
It involves Canada, on the Northern Border, who is the single largest supplier of foreign crude oil to the United States (More than Saudi Arabia). Ensuring a ready market for our neighbor's crude oil, (which is a heavy crude oil) not only keeps their development going, but means the refineries set up to refine that gravity of crude oil could be getting their feedstocks from Canada instead of places like Venezuela and Iran.
American oil would travel on that pipeline, too.
Part of pricing at the wellhead for oil is something called "takeaway capacity". When there is more oil than ability to deliver it, the bid price of the oil drops below market price (is "discounted") in an effort to get it on the pipeline. At one point, in the Williston Basin, Bakken oil was selling for $30.00/bbl LESS because there was no way to get it to refineries. That prompted the construction of multiple rail terminals to ship the oil out. Just how good was that for America and American companies, especially those trying to reach payout on wells so they could roll that money back into lease acquisition and drilling programs?
Canadian oil will find a way to market, whether we are that market, or the Chinese. Their economy depends on resource extraction (mining, oil and Gas) to a large degree, along with agriculture. In the geopolitical scheme of things, we would do well to not only keep our production moving better, but to ensure that the oil produced by our neighbor did not become a 'vital foreign interest' of another power which might well be adversarial in the very near future. At the same time, it would facilitate the delivery of oil to us by a power not engaged in funding terrorism, and improve the takeaway capacity for our own oil.
Not to mention an estimated 80,000 jobs involved in constructing the line.
Considering the Taxpayer isn't funding it, that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
