According to a recent poll, a novice politician, J.D. Scholten, is giving long-standing incumbent Steve King a run for his money in Iowa, trailing King by one percentage point. How is he doing it? One of the issues Scholten is raising is the effect of corporate concentration on farmers. Senator Cory Booker joined Scholten at an…
DetailsNAFTA 2.0 includes what many consider a novel provision: a sunset clause. That is, the agreement will terminate in 16 years unless all three parties agree to extend it. When the United States first proposed the concept of a sunset for the agreement, the reaction was to treat it akin to heresy. A disagreement between…
DetailsWith the conclusion of the NAFTA renegotiation, the next step in the United States is Congressional consideration. The assumption is that the agreement will be considered pursuant to Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), and there are some questions as to whether the Administration has complied with TPA. For example, TPA requires consultations with members “upon request,”…
DetailsTo situate the ongoing debate over trade, let’s take a look at some of the key takeaways from Judith Stein’s book Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. Stein traces the evolution of American trade policy from Nixon to Clinton, and in particular she identifies choices that were made, across successive…
DetailsThe Op-Ed can be found here.
There isn’t one. Contrary to the prevailing narrative, the pain didn’t start when the United States imposed tariffs on our trading partners. The pain started much earlier. When, exactly, doesn’t necessarily matter, though we can focus on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), its subsequent skirting of the rules, the WTO’s insistence on…
DetailsAs the Trump Administration continues to borrow the Democratic message that globalization has left American manufacturing workers behind, some of our trade partners have chosen to retaliate by targeting American agricultural workers. As we rightly focus on whether our farmers will be hurt, however, it is important to recall the degree to which our trade agreements…
DetailsLast month the Center for Automotive Research produced a briefing paper on the proposed changes to the NAFTA rules of origin. An evaluation of that briefing paper can be found here.
For many Americans, the 1950s were the golden age of American history. When asked when America was great, Donald Trump pointed to the post-war era of the 1940s and 1950s. America was the world’s unquestioned economic, political, and military power. The business of America was business. The American economy was humming as never before. The…
DetailsA previous blog explained that: the U.S. willingness to be the market of last resort has been a component critical to the functioning of the global trading system; the U.S. ability to serve as the market of last resort has been compromised by WTO overreach; and no other WTO Member seems to be willing to shoulder…
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