Donald Trump is against the TPP trade pact because he did not negotiate it, but “incompetents” did. Hillary Clinton is against TPP, sort of, at least in its present form, because Bernie Sanders is. Time to take a look at where the national interest might lie, with the help of the 788-page report—”Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement: Likely Impact on the U.S. Economy and on Specific Industry Sectors”—just released by the International Trade Commission.

We now know, or think we do, that the contribution of TPP to economic growth here is likely to be trivial: 0.15 percent annually by 2032 reckons the ITC’s “dynamic computable general equilibrium model.” And the ITC is famously optimistic about such matters and was under pressure from the Obama administration, no respecter of the independence of government agencies, to come up with something that would allow the likely beneficiaries of TPP, such as the Chamber of Commerce, to declare TPP to be “in our national interest.” Although the ITC projects a net increase of 128,000 jobs by 2032 (that’s about two weeks of job creation at our current pace), it also concludes that the increased intensity of competition with low-wage countries such as Vietnam, President Obama’s new friend (see pictures of him posing under a bust of Ho Chi Minh), will cause further job losses in already hard-hit sectors such as manufacturing.