Politics & Power Quote by Stephen F. Lynch

Lynch is doing something politicians rarely do in trade debates: he drags the conversation away from abstract “market access” and back to payroll math. By spotlighting the wage gulf between a “typical Central American consumer” and an “average American worker,” he punctures the sunny premise that CAFTA is mainly about selling more U.S. goods abroad. If your target customers can’t afford your products, export-booster rhetoric starts to look like branding, not economics.

The specific intent is prosecutorial. He’s not weighing pros and cons; he’s building a case that the public-facing rationale is a cover story. The phrase “it becomes clear” signals a rhetorical trap: once you accept the wage premise, you’re invited to treat any export argument as willful misdirection. Even the awkward slip (“not to the increase”) reads like urgency spilling over polish, as if the conclusion matters more than the syntax.

Subtext: CAFTA is about capital mobility, not consumer demand. If exports aren’t the real engine, then the unspoken beneficiaries are companies seeking cheaper labor, looser regulations, or stronger investor protections - and the unspoken costs land on workers exposed to wage competition and on communities pressured by offshoring threats. He’s also cueing a moral argument without stating it outright: a trade deal premised on low wages isn’t partnership; it’s arbitrage.

Context matters. CAFTA (mid-2000s) was sold as development policy and geopolitical strategy as much as commerce. Lynch’s line reframes it as class politics: not “America versus Central America,” but owners versus labor across borders. That reframing is the quote’s power.