New Op-Ed: "G-20 Summit: Fresh Winds of Economic Leadership from the North"

I have a new op-ed on FoxNews.com today.  Here's the tease:

Leaders from 19 countries and the European Union will gather for the G-20 summit in Toronto beginning June 26 to discuss how to stem the global recession and get the world back on the path to strong, stable economic growth. They picked a good spot, as the assembled leaders could learn a lot from their host country.

Since the global recession hit two years ago, Canada has implemented a broad array of free market tax and trade policies. As a result, our neighbor to the north has surpassed an increasingly statist, mercantilist United States in The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. More importantly, Canada is emerging from the “Great Recession” much more rapidly than the U.S. and virtually every other G-20 participant as well.

Read the whole thing here.  Go ahead.  You know you want to.

New Op-Ed: On Trade, It's Put Up Or Shut Up

I have a new op-ed in The Daily Caller today.  I hope you like it; as always, your feedback is welcome.

On trade, it’s put up or shut up

With his signature health care legislation now law, President Obama has a little under three months to prove that he actually supports free trade. After that, all bets are off.

By almost any metric, the Obama administration’s trade policy has been a disappointment. Inaction pervades, and our trading partners have gone from mildly annoyed to downright hostile. But the American trade agenda didn’t always look to be headed this way. In Spring 2009, the White House dramatically reversed the protectionist campaign rhetoric of then-Senator Obama. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk launched an aggressive campaign advocating free trade and denouncing protectionism. The White House’s first Trade Policy Agenda called for ratification of the pending U.S.-Panama Free Trade Agreement “relatively quickly,” and sought to advance other completed FTAs with Colombia and South Korea. The Agenda also unequivocally supported the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, and anticipated congressional renewal of the President’s “fast track” trade negotiating authority.

Then political reality set in.

Immediately following the shift in White House trade rhetoric, congressional protectionists, almost all within Obama’s own Party, launched a stifling counter-offensive. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), for example, expressed disappointment with USTR’s pro-NAFTA rhetoric and pledged to make it clear to President Obama that “our trade policy is not working and that it needs fixing.” Such comments proved effective. The White House abandoned overt free trade actions and speeches in order to secure needed health care votes from anti-trade Democrats – a move that Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) apologetically confirmed at June 2009 Cato Institute event.

As the health care debate stagnated, so did US trade policy, and it remains that way today. Signed FTAs remain shelved, despite the fact that the EU, China and others have negotiated preferential deals with the same FTA partners, each to the competitive disadvantage of American companies. The WTO’s Doha Round negotiations are comatose, even though an ambitious Doha deal would provide billions in benefits to US economy. And US exporters endure superfluous pains because the White House has failed to resolve several bilateral trade disputes, including $2.4 billion in Mexican tariffs resulting from the United States’ NAFTA-illegal ban on Mexican trucking, and the threat of almost $900 million in Brazilian sanctions based on US non-compliance with WTO rulings against American cotton subsidies.

Despite these problems, some might argue that the National Export Initiative and the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations are concrete evidence that the Obama administration is dedicated to free trade. But real free trade policies – like the pending FTAs – involve immediate market liberalization at home and abroad. The NEI, by contrast, is a one-sided, non-controversial program which seeks to expand US exports through a timid combination of margin-tweaks that most economists believe will have little effect on US trade flows. Thus, calling the NEI “free trade” is like calling onanism “free love.”

The TPP Agreement, on the other hand, could yield significant trade gains, but would take years complete. Indeed, USTR Kirk lauded the TPP negotiations precisely because they won’t be completed for years. Of course, this is the same USTR whose 2010 Trade Agenda mentioned the word “import” only five times, and never once in terms of domestic market access. So Kirk’s statements about the TPP and the administration’s advancement of the NEI are hardly surprising. They’re just par for the cowardly course.

Throughout all of this, administration officials and the few free trade Democrats in Congress have quietly reassured the US business community that America’s free trade legacy will re-emerge once the contentious health care debate is over. In September 2009, Transportation Department officials told a concerned group of affected exporters that the White House would not resolve the Mexican trucking dispute because the President needed Teamster support for ObamaCare. And at an October 2009 event, Reps. Cuellar and John Tanner (D-TN) assured their audience that the FTAs would progress once the health care debate ended.

Well, folks, health care’s over. Time to put up or shut up.

Most of the United States’ current trade irritants are within the White House’s control to fix, as long as the President willing to expend an iota of political will to get things done. Signed U.S. FTAs have already been ratified by the partners countries and now only require the President to send their respective implementing legislation to Congress for ratification. While many congressional Democrats will resist such legislation, Obama can expect significant support from Republicans, many of whom, like House Trade Subcommittee Ranking Member Kevin Brady (R-TX), have routinely called on the President to submit the trade deals. Other issues show similar potential for bi-partisan resolution. All they require is an end to the White House’s politically-motivated ambivalence.

In late June, Washington will turn its attention to the November mid-term elections, and controversial legislation will become untouchable. If President Obama and his free trade supporters really mean what they’ve said over the past year about the President’s commitment to free trade, the White House will move on one or more of the unresolved trade issues before this “silly season” begins.

If, on the other hand, June comes and goes, and these issues are still unsettled because of the administration’s political calculations, then the die will have been cast. And no amount of excuses will be able to convince American businesses and consumers that this President really cares about free trade.

*     *     *

Bloomberg's Al Hunt strikes a similar note in his op-ed today.  I highly recommend giving it a look.

New Op-ed in The Daily Caller: "Exporting Nonsense"

For those of you who read this blog religiously (ha!), some of the stuff in my new op-ed ("Exporting Nonsense") in The Daily Caller will sound a bit familiar - it cobbles together several of my musings on the administration's new National Export Initiative.

For the rest of you, enjoy!

Given constraints on the op-ed's length, I had to omit some key data referenced in the piece.  All of that is available in various postings here, if you're interested.

(And for those of you who have yet to discover TDC, check it out.  It's a great new website for straight news, great conservative/libertarian commentary, and good ol' fashioned beltway gossip.)

Op-ed Update

The good folks over at RealClearMarkets have published my op-ed, "President Obama's Accidental War on America's Exporters." It's pretty much the same as what I posted here a week ago, but in case you're interested, it's here.

President Obama’s Accidental War on America’s Exporters

(Ed. note: this op-ed couldn't find a home, so I'm just publishing it here.)

President Obama and his friends in Congress have levied billions of dollars in new taxes to secure passage of their domestic agenda. This you probably already know. But you might not know that the folks paying the taxes are American exporters, that they’ve been doing it for months now, and that US labor unions and foreign governments, not the Treasury Department, are the ones collecting.

Such is the truth behind the President’s accidental war on America’s exporters.

I say “accidental war” because the administration’s public statements, and basic economics, belie overt bellicosity. This summer, the White House announced a new effort to help US exporters by expanding foreign markets, and the President routinely speaks of exports’ critical role in the long-term stability of the US economy. This, of course, is smart policy: with 95 percent of the world’s consumers living outside America’s borders, foreign markets are vital for US farmers, manufacturers and service providers, and developing economies provide fertile ground for the seeds of US business. That American exporters typically pay higher wages than their domestically-focused counterparts is icing on the economic cake.

Yet despite the cheery posturing and its sound reasoning, the White House and congressional Democrats have routinely made choices that end up closing markets, rather than opening them. Such choices result from a basic political decision to secure domestic priorities no matter the price, but all too often American exporters are left footing the bill.

Exhibit A is the President’s mid-September decision to impose, at the request of the United Steelworkers union, prohibitive tariffs on Chinese tires under “Section 421” of US trade law. Contrary to Obama’s excuses, the law gave him absolute discretion to impose the tariffs – discretion he used as a bargaining chip to solidify USW support for his fall health care push. But while the President’s protectionism ensured union adulation, it also resulted in China’s initiation of anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigations of US chicken and automobile exports. The chicken retaliation – hinted by China weeks before Obama’s decision was announced – now threatens a growing market that purchased $722 million in American poultry last year alone. And while the autos case is small, an affirmative decision could foreclose the Chinese market to US car exports for years.

China also has used the tires decision as an excuse to abandon World Trade Organization negotiations to eliminate tariffs on chemicals and other products - so-called "sectoral agreements" that are part of the Doha Round negotiations on industrial market access. Because these side agreements contain "critical mass" exceptions that prevent them from taking effect unless almost all major exporters participate, China’s rejection essentially ruins the tariff elimination party for everyone else – including many large US exporters like Dow and Dupont that view the sectorals as key to their long-term global competitiveness.

The tires case is not an isolated incident. The Democrats’ refusal to ratify pending bilateral Free Trade Agreements has cost American exporters billions and is rooted in a cowardly decision to avoid “controversy” until health care and cap-and-trade legislation are secured. For example, Commerce Secretary Locke recently confirmed that the administration would not seek congressional passage of the US-Colombia FTA in 2009 because of these domestic priorities. Yet according to Locke’s own Commerce Department, American companies pay about $1.9 million per day in Colombian tariffs they wouldn't owe if the FTA were in force. Given that the agreement was signed in November 2006, this political stalling has resulted in a pointless tax on American exporters of around $2 billion and counting. Trade agreements with South Korea and Panama have been similarly shelved, and considering the US-Korea FTA is the largest since NAFTA, the price of its delay likely dwarfs Colombia’s billions.

Exporters are also under attack because the White House has refused to re-open US roads to Mexican trucks (a direct NAFTA violation) in order to curry favor with the Teamsters. Part of the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act, the trucking ban provoked $2.4 billion in additional Mexican tariffs on 89 American products. After signing the legislation with full knowledge of its NAFTA-illegality, President Obama promised the businesses injured by Mexico’s retaliation that his administration would quickly resolve the dispute. Six months later, the Transportation Department has crafted a solution but says the White House is sitting on the fix because it needs Teamster support for ObamaCare. So exporters will keep paying.

From these examples, the result of the White House’s political strategy is clear: American farmers and manufacturers are being forced to pay billions of dollars to foreign governments – and to lose new markets and customers – so President Obama can achieve his domestic policy goals. The President is literally buying off American labor unions with US exporters’ money, and in the process is waging an immoral war on an integral part of the American economy and thousands of innocent workers.

Accidental or not, this war’s damage is very real, and it’s time the President demanded a ceasefire.