More comments on the election

In a response to my post last night, I got a comment from someone who said two things. First, the comment was that the Fox promise was not as strong as it had been at the start. Fox clearly had a large job to do in transforming the economy of the PRI state that had been there for more than 70 years. He did not realize the promise that everyone felt in the joys of 2000. As noted in my previous post, economic growth in the official statistics has been pitiful. But if you look behind the numbers, there is plenty of evidence that the economy of the country is progressing more rapidly than the numbers suggest. Part of the question that I see for the election today is whether the voters will discern that progress or whether they will fall into the patrimony that AMLO wants to offer.

AMLO wants to get Mexico out of NAFTA. That would set the country back. In the last dozen years, the country has grown and improved in many areas as a result of a robust trade policy that includes trade agreements beyond NAFTA. Stopping that would reduce the growth in the country, the actual growth.

The writer also criticized my comments about Lopez Obrador by suggesting that I said only what others said about AMLO not what he has said. I have been around politicians for a long time. My point in quoting the four speakers from the NYT was to suggest that I believed that the election will be decided by the middle class and that there is a clear division between some who believe the future for Mexico will be in a protective state and those who do not.

My reading of both Lopez Obrador's speeches and his actions as Mayor of Mexico City is that he believes deeply in the protective state. Lopez Obrador has been charactured by his opponents but I believe that elements of the characture are accurate. AMLO proposes to spend his way out of the problems that Mexico faces. That is a similar proposition to the one offered by FDR when the US faced the great depression. There is little credible evidence that any program of massive public works or subsidy ever helped grow the economy. In the long term the things begun by Fox's predecessor but grown by Fox seem to be the most likely way for Mexico to continue to progress.