[cmarschner]

The estimated benefit of TTIP is 400,000 jobs and 0.5% GDP for the EU. Not much.

Apparently, the few selected MoP in Germany who were given access to the drafts had a few hours to look at a 1000+ pages, in English legalese, with a dictionary but no internet access.

Apparently, the drafts were full of certain spelling errors. The assumption was that they were personalized and injected on purpose such that photographs could be traced back to the origin.

Source - German media coverage.

[chiaro]

>The estimated benefit of TTIP is 400,000 jobs and 0.5% GDP for the EU.

My support for most post-globalisation trade liberalisation treaties tends to be lukewarm. However, this can't really be called "not much". 400,000 jobs against a working population of ~300M is a decrease in unemployment by .13 percentage points. 0.5% increase in GDP is still ~70B that otherwise wouldn't be there.

[skosch]

And those 70B are going to trickle down, aren't they?

[pizza234]

Estimates vary wildly. According to a Techdirt [1] article, the mentioned 0.5% is pure marketing.

Besides, you can't decontextualize the gains from the losses, both economical and cultural.

I can imagine for example, in worst case scenario, billions transferred from EU to tax havens because of the ISDS, and job losses because of [partial] loss of protection of Geographical indications.

[1]=https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140417/09391926947/tafta...

[Symbiote]

What would those MPs lose if they leaked the text? It seems like a vote-winning action...

[mcv]

I suspect it's illegal and punishable in some way. There are definitely German MPs who would be congratulated rather than shunned for exposing this.

But if only selected MPs can see the text at all, maybe they've been selected carefully.

[richmarr]

My guess would be that they'd be gently shunned, so would probably be weighing up the relative merit of some (possibly short term) popularity against longer term merit of being able to effectively collaborate with party & peers.

[erikb]

What I don't get is why you would make your peers your enemy. Making the US bargaining side your enemy makes sense, but what problems would your peers have with that? Especially long term.

[lumberjack]

They would probably be chastised by their respective parties.

[ulfw]

That's the opposite of a 'democracy'.