Not weighing in on if this is a good or bad thing overall, but I did listen to a pretty good NPR podcast a while back that explains a little more about this treaty and how it was affecting businesses in the US.
I really liked that podcast as well. If I remember correctly, one take away from the podcast that is relevant to a lot of comments below was that the U.S. used to get a net benefit from the weird international mail system. It was more recently that the import/export by direct mail balance shifted to make it a net loss to the U.S. Though it didn't sound like who the net winners and losers would be was strongly considered when the system was designed.
Generally speaking, I’m in favor of the US exiting this treaty, it really does seem like a clear distortion of the retail shipping market.
But I think it’s going to worryingly contribute to the dynamic where other nations, with quite a bit of justification in this case, see the US as playing a “heads I win, tails you lose” game with the world.
I also think people are fooling themselves if they think high-wage, low-skill manufacturing jobs are going to come back to the US because of this. Those jobs are gone, and automation is going to keep them from coming back.
This will mainly help highly automated manufacturing shops in the US, and online resellers with warehouses in the US.
Basically, I see this bringing more Amazon warehouse jobs, not many more much-mythologized blue-collar manufacturing jobs.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...