The NAFTA shovel.

• Position: North American Free Trade Agreement - Editorial

There's an old Texas saying that when you find you've dug yourself into a hole, the first thing to do is quit digging," says the irrepressible Jim Hightower. "That's what NAFTA is - a great big shovel digging us deeper into that hole."

Hightower is right on the money. NAFTA, even with Bill Clinton's recently concluded side agreements, is ill-advised and ill-conceived.

Clinton favors NAFTA because he is beholden to giant U.S. multinationals, who will be the prime beneficiaries of the agreement. George Bush negotiated the treaty for his pals in the business community, and Clinton is keeping up the tradition. Surprise, surprise: They have the same pals.

Also, Clinton does not wish to alienate the Eastern media establishment, at whose table he supped on Martha's Vineyard. The New York Times and The Washington Post have grown hoarse claiming that NAFTA would be good for everybody - and suggesting that only the nuts and nativists who follow Ross Perot, or the hidebound officials of the AFL-CIO, would disagree.

But on purely economic grounds, NAFTA will not be good for most Americans, as Jeff Faux devastatingly documents in the July-August issue of Challenge, which calls itself "the magazine of economic affairs." After plowing through all the pro-NAFTA studies by the Clinton Administration and the business community, Faux finds that they tout only the most negligible benefits and mask the most obvious costs.

For workers, NAFTA supporters like to claim that it will bring many more jobs than it eliminates. "The evidence does not support this claim," Faux says. The U.S. International Trade Commission, he notes, "found that the highest estimate of a potential NAFTA contribution to employment in the United States was - are you ready? - eight one-hundredths of 1 per cent!" Many other credible studies have predicted a net loss of 500,000 jobs to one million jobs, Faux adds.

NAFTA supporters also like to claim that it will result in better jobs in the United States, with the less desirable, less well-paying jobs going to Mexico.

"Again, there is no evidence for this claim," Faux writes. "Historically, U.S. workers who...