Greg Mankiw asks easy questions:
Congress is about to consider expanding Trade Adjustment Assistance, according to the Washington Post. I have two questions about the program:
Can you really tell whether worker is losing his job due to trade or due to other forces, such as technological change?
Is a worker who loses a job due to trade deserving of a more generous safety net than a worker who loses his job due to other forces, such as technological change?
Attacking from the other side, Dean Baker makes the fair point that TAA is more political grease than economic compensation:
[W]orkers who lose their job directly due to trade are a small minority of the workers who are harmed by trade. The vast majority of workers who are harmed by trade are workers who earn lower wages as a result of the patterns of trade promoted by recent trade agreements. These are disproportionately workers who do not have college degrees. The proposals for trade adjustment assistance do nothing to help these workers.
Alex Tabarrok is probably comfortable with that expediency.
Trade Diversion 
He who asks the questions controls the debate.
Instead of allowing Greg Mankiw, an insenstive elitist academic, to control the debate, lets ask the question that sufferers of his policies ask:
1) How would Mr. Mankiw like to start a new career in middle age with children in his household like so many programmers have done in the last few years?
2) When will Mr. Mankiw volunteer to have his job offhsored ?
Only those who practice what they preach have any credibility.