The U.S.-Mexico Trade Agreement is about to send a flood of billions northward across the border, this time it will be dollar bills doing the crossing. President Trump isn’t fussy, we’ll take pesos too. It’s nice to have a president who gets foreign countries to send Uncle Sam pallets of cash for a change!

by Mark Megahan

They don’t have to like it, admit it, or even acknowledge it, but indications show that Mexico just signed the check to pay for President Trump’s “big, beautiful wall.” In the memo blank they can write in: United States Mexico Trade Agreement, if it makes them more comfortable. The end result is the same, $25 billion is only a fraction of what is about to flood northward across the border because of the destruction of NAFTA. They might as well start loading pallets of pesos for shipment.

President Trump never thought for a split second that the Mexican government would make a single lump sum payment explicitly for the wall. As Daily Republic put it, “Mexico will never cut a check to the U.S. Treasury, but President Donald Trump is zeroing in on a plan so that the president can argue America’s southern neighbor will indeed fund the border wall.” He didn’t even have to tax “remittances” or threaten a “VAT tax” to do it.

That powerful plan bore fruit this week. Once again, President Trump did what his predecessors called impossible, and made it look easy.

Because he bluntly told everyone involved exactly what he was going to do, then did it, U.S. workers, carmakers, manufacturers, and especially taxpayers will benefit, Wayne Allyn Root reports for Town Hall.

“Trump did it. He won. We all won,” Root declares. He “guarantees” the trade deal just signed “will save us tens of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.” Even constructing the “Cadillac” model of the wall would come in under $25 billion.

A drop in the bucket compared to what is in store for our industries.

“Once again,” he writes, “Trump accomplished what establishment politicians of both parties said could never be done.”

You can cross off another campaign promise kept, too. He has long “blamed the 24-year-old [NAFTA] trade pact for decimating the U.S. manufacturing industry and the loss of thousands of factory jobs.”

Stock in the Kansas City Southern railroad jumped to a three and a half year high on news of the deal’s acceptance, Marketwatch reports.

They “upgraded the railroad operator” because “this week’s trade deal with Mexico removed a ‘wall of worry,’” by removing “a major hurdle” for KSU investors, market analyst Jason Seidl of Cowen & Co. advised. The company gets “nearly half its revenue” from Mexico.

Steel is about to make a big comeback because of the deal too. S&P Global Platts announced Wednesday that Nucor is ramping up to build “a new galvanizing plant in central Mexico as part of a 50-50 joint venture with Japan’s JFE.”

The company’s CEO, John Ferriola, agrees with the Trump administration that NAFTA needed to be updated, especially “rules of origin stipulations in the current agreement.”

In Salt Lake City, Utah, Derek Miller is the president and CEO of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. He’s convinced the deal will bring “predictability and stability” to local manufacturers.

“Exports from Utah to Mexico have grown by over 300 percent in the last 10 years,” Miller asserts. “A trade agreement with Mexico outlines the ‘rules of the game’ so Utah companies can get in the game and win.”

He hopes Canada will take the hint and strike a similar bargain. Utah does even more business with Canada than they do Mexico.

Even left-leaning-liberals have something to be happy about. “The new pact,” liberal Vox reports, includes several labor rules meant to benefit workers on both sides of the border.”

Vox also notes “American auto companies that assemble their cars in Mexico would also need to use more U.S.-made car parts to avoid tariffs, which would help U.S. factory workers.” Another thing the deal calls for is increased wages for Mexican workers.

“About 40 percent of those cars would need to be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour,” which, they point out, is “three times more than Mexico’s minimum wage.”

A notice of the finalized agreement will be sent to Congress on Friday. President Trump is practically glowing.

“I like to call this deal the United-States Mexico Trade Agreement, I think it’s an elegant name,” he said Monday, knowing that made the Canadians a little nervous because their name isn’t on the deal.

He also called Canada a “smaller segment” compared with Mexico, who he referred to as a “very large trading partner.”

Media pundits were quick to feign confusion. But, they stammer, “Canada is a dominant exporter of crude oil to the United States,” insider analyst “Manufacturing” defends.

Well, that was then. It seems that since we have been stockpiling oil for forty years we might not be needing that Canadian crude much longer. The U.S. now has refining ability that we haven’t had for decades and we can actually start burning some domestic “dead dinosaurs” until the oil market loosens up again.

Under the Mexico agreement 75 percent of cars will be required to be made with North American parts, and 70 percent of the “steel, aluminum and glass used to make a vehicle must also originate in North America,” Manufacturing reports.

As Washington Post observed back in January, “Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto told an assembly of top diplomats last week that Mexico of course will not pay for Donald Trump’s wall.

His predecessor, former president Vicente Fox, put it more bluntly, declaring: “TRUMP, when will you understand that I am not paying for that [profanity] wall.”

For all intents and purposes, when Mexico caved in to Trump’s demands for a level playing field to trade on, they might as well have directly signed a [profanity] check.