No accurate account of U.S. participation in agreements to reduce tariffs and expand trade supports Trump’s inaugural address claims that “For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry” and “made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon.” Broadly speaking, we have benefited from having increasingly prosperous trading partners to buy our products and from the lower prices and greater choices afforded by opportunities to buy theirs.

Does this mean that everything’s been fine with U.S. trade policy? No. While agreements to lower trade barriers and expand trade almost certainly enlarge the total economic pie in each participating country, they almost certainly also produce winners and losers within each country. Moreover, the gains, while larger in aggregate, tend to be broadly diffused while the losses are more concentrated and visible. U.S. policymakers have to find better ways to address the economic costs borne by those on the losing end to share the benefits of trade more fully.

But we shouldn’t focus exclusively on disruptions due to trade, which are often conflated with a broader decline in good-paying jobs for workers without college degrees, especially in manufacturing. Berkeley economist Brad DeLong has a smart but long essay debunking the argument that trade agreements have had much to do with the decline in manufacturing jobs as a share of total U.S. employment since the 1940s. Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum has a “shorter Brad DeLong” here.

Thus, maintaining a high-employment economy is the first, best policy to minimize the economic losses of workers whose jobs disappear. Losing one’s job is also less serious economically if one has adequate unemployment insurance to tide one over while looking for a suitable new job and not forced to just take the first available one. It’s also less serious if it doesn’t cost one access to affordable health care, or drain resources intended for one’s retirement or one’s kids’ education. Republican budget plans would do the opposite, starting with repealing the Affordable Care Act without providing an adequate substitute. The election probably also ends any likelihood that Congress will consider policies to modernize the unemployment insurance system, even though the current system is protecting an historically low number of unemployed workers.