Making News: Interviewed on Buy American and Trade-Related Infrastructure Issues

Tags

Asset Leadership Network, Buy American, GAO, Government Accountability Office, infrastructure, Making News, Trade

I’m pleased to announce that the video is now on-line of an interview I gave last week on the intersection between infrastructure and trade policy issues – and specifically, on the future of the Buy American programs governing the public sector’s multi-billion dollar purchases of goods and services.

The session was sponsored by the Asset Leadership Network, an organization of professionals in engineering, architecture, construction, land-use planning, and related fields. One of their highest priorities: making sure that whatever infrastructure build-out and repair efforts the nation launches results in the best quality systems that create the biggest growth and employment bangs for taxpayers’ bucks.

It was gratifying to learn of the Network’s interest in my research into whether recent trade agreements covering government procurement – which affect the extent to which infrastructure systems are made out of American-produced manufactures and materials – are leveling global playing field as promised, and giving a fair-shake to U.S.-based businesses and their employees.

As RealityChek regulars know, the answer – according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) – is an emphatic “No.” And in this video, I describe the GAO’s main findings, as well as what they tell us about U.S. trade policy’s broader failures.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other events.

Following Up: Why Buy American Reform is More Urgent – & Feasible – Than Ever

Tags

Buy American, Following Up, free trade agreements, GAO, Government Accountability Office, Government Procurement Agreement, GPA, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Obama, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, World Trade Organization, WTO

Although it doubtless wasn’t an intention of Wall Street Journal reporters Coulter Jones and Shane Shifflett, their article this morning on President Trump’s recent efforts to strengthen the U.S. government’s Buy America regulations considerably bolstered the case that overhaul is indeed vital – and within reach politically.

As I reported last month, a February Government Accountability Office (GAO) study showed that the United States is getting completely fleeced by its adherence to provisions in various bilateral or regional trade deals (like the North American Free Trade Agreement), along with a worldwide plurilateral agreement, that aim at eliminating domestic preference programs like Buy American regs.

The two main problems, according to the GAO? First, the best available data reveals that the United States has opened up its government purchases to foreign competition much wider than the nearly 50 other signatories of the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) sponsored by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Second, Washington’s implementation of this arrangement and of similar provisions in other trade deals has been so negligent that the U.S. government never bothered even to find out how well the GPA, or any of the similar agreements, was working until two Democratic Senators commissioned the GAO study – more than twenty years after the global agreement was signed.

Journal correspondents Jones and Shifflett spent most of their article purporting to explain that any administration efforts to boost Washington’s purchases of U.S.-origin goods and services would amount to “swimming against the tide.” After all, as they documented, “For the current fiscal year beginning in October, foreign businesses have received a bigger share of federal contract dollars than in any other year since at least 2009.” In fact, “foreign-owned companies already hauled in more money from federal contracts in the past three months [i.e, during the Trump presidency] than in any corresponding period in a decade.”

Moreover, any changes to procurement policy made by President Trump “would likely face legal challenges….Additionally, any executive order Mr. Trump may issue requiring the government to buy exclusively American-made products has the potential to be challenged in court, or overturned by Congress or a future administration” – because of trade treaties that aimed “to make it easier for U.S. companies to compete overseas by mutually easing trade restrictions with other countries.”

But the recent rise in federal contracts for foreign-made goods, according to the article, has nothing to do with either Trump administration negligence or uncontrollable forces. As the authors point out, “Much of the payout to foreign-owned firms in the first quarter of this calendar year was set in motion by the Obama administration.” Of course, that was the same Obama administration that came into office in 2009 and oversaw that previously noted longer-term surge in contracts awarded to foreign goods and services providers.

Further, those trade treaties described by the Journal piece as such towering obstacles to a Buy American overhaul are the same trade treaties that the GAO has strongly indicated are utter failures.

The administration knows about the unacceptable record of these arrangements, as do the Democratic Senators who requested the GAO study. How difficult, then, would it really be for the president to muster bipartisan Congressional support for declaring these deals null and void – at least pending convincing evidence that they’re working after all? And given the pervasive discrimination U.S.-based goods and service providers clearly face in most foreign government markets, how difficult would it be for Mr. Trump to win similar legislative backing for narrowing the loopholes and waivers contained in the current Buy American regulations – and monitoring and enforcing tighter rules much more effectively?

In other words, how many American lawmakers would insist on continuing to obey broken treaties and on refusing to re-level the procurement playing field unilaterally for domestic businesses and their employers? The answers may not be obvious to Mainstream Media journalists. They’re surely more obvious to politicians accountable to American voters.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Where America Has Literally Been Asleep at the Switch on Trade

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Buy American, Canada, Commerce Department, European Union, free trade agreements, FTAs, government procurement, Government Procurement Agreement, GPA, Japan, Jeff Merkley, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Norway, Politico, South Korea, Tammy Baldwin, Trade, Trump, Wilbur Ross, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Here’s a big, sincere shout-out to U.S. Senators Jeff Merkley (Oregon) and Tammy Baldwin (Illinois). Thanks to their insightful curiosity, Americans have just gotten evidence that their country’s trade policy is indeed as much of a disaster area as claimed by President Trump and other critics.

Their accomplishment? The two Democrats asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to look into how well Washington has been implementing a more than two-decade-old global trade agreement aimed at opening government procurement markets around the world. Also examined: the trade liberalization record of government procurement provisions of bilateral and regional trade agreements signed by the United States (like the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA).

The findings were released last month (and alertly reported by Politico‘s trade correspondents), and make clear that the United States has been getting royally shafted. Moreover, these results have been inevitable both because the global deal was so poorly conceived from an American standpoint, and because literally no one in the U.S. trade policy-making apparatus has been tracking the results of either the global agreement or the relevant sections of the narrower trade deals agreement affecting literally trillions of dollars worth of actual and potential sales.

Even worse, the blithe assumption that other signatory countries has been scrupulously abiding by all of these procurement agreements has sharply limited America’s willingness to expand and tighten the Buy American rules that cover its own official purchases – in the process, passing up major opportunities for growth and job creation at a time of economic weakness. And P.S. This includes President Trump.

The GPA is a “plurilateral” agreement negotiated under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. In other words, accession by WTO members is voluntary. Still, the deal, which went into effect in 1996, currently encompasses 47 countries that are now committed to placing foreign enterprises and their own domestic entities on an equal footing when they compete for government contracts. Nine other WTO members are in the process of signing on. Most of America’s bilateral and regional trade agreements also prohibit discrimination in awarding these opportunities for supplying governments with goods and services. Consequently, 19 other countries have promised the United States to open their official procurement markets to the United States in return for America opening its own to them. (All of these governments have carved out various agreed on exemptions. And sub-national governments are covered by these deals as well.)

With stakes this high, you’d think that at some point the U.S. government would display reasonably consistent interest during the multi-decade lives of these trade agreements in whether they’ve been paying off. But according to the GAO researchers, you’d be wrong.

Even though the GPA requires detailed, annual reporting of procurement statistics by signatory governments, the GAO’s

“review of data that the United States and next five largest GPA parties [the European Union, Japan, Canada, South Korea, and Norway] submitted to the WTO for 2008 through 2013 found that a number of parties did not submit the reports annually, the submitted reports did not include all required data, and each party’s reports included inconsistencies that limit the data’s comparability. Further, a lack of common understanding on definitions of key terms has led to inconsistent reporting practices among the GPA parties, and a GPA statistical working group has made little progress in addressing such challenges.”

Some specific failings:

>”although Canada submitted annual notifications with central government procurement data for 2008 through 2013, the notifications did not include data on procurement by subcentral governments or by other government entities”;

>”Japan’s annual notifications have not included procurement by entities such as utilities and state-owned enterprises that are covered by the GPA”:

>”South Korea has not submitted notifications for any year except 2010, and Japan has not submitted a notification for 2012 although it did so for other years through 2013.”

>”Of the U.S. FTAs [free trade agreements] we reviewed, only NAFTA requires its parties to report annual statistics on government procurement; however, the last data exchange between the three NAFTA parties took place in 2005. As a result, information about the extent to which U.S. FTA partner governments open procurement to U.S. suppliers is not available.” [Emphasis added.]

The United States has been far from a whiz in reporting, either. But its failings have been much less excusable given all the evidence provided by the GAO showing that it’s opened its procurement markets much wider than any other GPA or FTA signatory. Despite the above data limitations, the GAO nonetheless felt confident in concluding that for 2010, “[T]he United States reported more than twice as much GPA-covered government procurement as the next five largest GPA parties combined, although total U.S. government procurement is less than the combined total for the other five parties.”

In money terms, the value of contracts opened to non-discriminatory bidding by the United States at all levels of government was $837 billion. The value of contracts opened by those five non-U.S. GPA parties that promised to liberalize the most in absolute terms was some $381 billion. Yet total government procurement in the United States that year was some $1.7 trillion, the GAO estimates. For the other five GPA signatories, it was much larger – $4.4 trillion.

Moreover, because of the aforementioned reporting failures, it’s not possible at all for the U.S. government, or the American people, to gauge procurement liberalization under free trade agreements – with the exception of Canada. But when their procurement budgets are added in, and duplication eliminated (e.g., for Canada), the total market that should be available to American business and workers at least in principle is $4.4 trillion. 

The GAO doesn’t conclude that U.S. trade partners are simply capitalizing on Washington’s indifference to flout their treat obligations. In fact, in one instance, it even tries to get them partly off the hook: “Many EU member states, as well as Japan and South Korea, have actual government expenditures smaller than the United States’ and are therefore likely to have more smaller-value individual procurement contracts that fall below the GPA threshold levels.” (Decisions on the smallest government contracts typically are one of the main GPA and FTA procurement carve-outs.)

But if so many foreign government contracts are too small to be opened for non-discriminatory bidding, then obviously these trade deals are too poorly structured to give American producers anything remotely like reciprocity. And more important, Washington so far has had no way of knowing judging by any measures whether non-discrimination in principle is being translated into non-discrimination in fact .

As Mr. Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, recently noted, “There’s not a lot of point making trade deals if you don’t enforce them.” He could have added that such enforcement is impossible without seeking and obtaining reliable data on results. Donald Trump’s predecessors have flunked these two crucial tests of American trade policy-making. Until he gets strong evidence to the contrary, it’s time for the president to take the logical next step, assume that the GPA and the FTA government procurement measures have been serious mistakes, and ignore them as thoroughly as America’s competitors evidently have.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Buy American Road to a Stronger Recovery

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Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, Buy American, Christopher S. Murphy, Department of Transportation, domestic content, Economic Policy Institute, manufacturing, railroads, recovery, Robert Scott, Trade, Trade Deficits, University of Massachusetts, {What's Left of) Our Economy

As 2015 draws to a close, the bad news about an already dreary American economy seems to be getting worse. For example, the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s system for forecasting economic growth – which has been very reliable lately – currently expects the nation’s output to expand after inflation at an annual rate of only 1.30 percent. So it’s great to be able to report that some in the policy community have been touting practical ways to strengthen the recovery – and good job creation – that don’t depend on creating ever more national debt. Their proposal: require the public sector to buy more U.S.-made goods, and especially manufactures.

Some Buy American rules are permitted by World Trade Organization rules (ditto for similar measures by other countries); therefore Washington and state and local governments are able to make sure that some of what they purchase with Americans’ tax dollars is produced in the United States, and therefore generates growth and employment at home. But as shown by new studies from the University of Massachusetts and the Economic Policy Institute, much more can and should be done.

The UMass report, published earlier this month, makes clear the enormous potential of that further growth. It found that the American public sector is the biggest single customer of goods and services in the world, with its appetite reaching $1.10 trillion in 2013. Moreover, manufactured goods represent $400 billion of that total. Since the American manufacturing sector turned out $2.2 trillion worth of products in 2013 according to the UMass researchers, government is already a huge player.

Although its findings apply to all Buy America programs, the UMass study zeroes in on those that have been in place for buses and rail cars since 1982 – precisely to revive two once-thriving industries that seemed in terminal decline. Indeed, to this day, none of the world’s major rail equipment producers are based in the United States. The study is especially valuable for its detailed examination of the Department of Transportation’s domestic content standards, which regulate how much of the makeup of a manufactured product (i.e., the share of its parts, components, and materials) needs to originate in the United States in order to be legally considered American-made.

The authors conclude that big reasons for the continued troubles of the rolling stock industry have been domestic content provisions that:

> remain too low (largely because the content of sub-components isn’t adequately taken into account, and because the rules don’t cover design and administrative activities);

>are continually compromised by too many waivers;

>and are poorly monitored and enforced.

In addition, the study makes a critical point about the inadequacy of the current “lowest price” standards that enable foreign producers to win many rail and bus contracts for the share of content they can compete for under Buy American rules. These criteria, they rightly note, greatly understate the longer-term benefits to the U.S. economy – and therefore to taxpayers – of nurturing more manufacturing production and employment at home.

As a result, even though the rules require that 60 percent of all federally purchased rail car components be made in the United States, and 100 percent of the final assembly performed domestically, the actual overall mandated U.S. content of these systems is only 40 percent. The UMass researchers estimate that even raising the effective domestic content level for rail car procurement from the current 40 percent to 60 percent would increase by nearly 29 percent the numbers of American jobs created by such spending. And of course, each dollar of that re-channeled spending would stay in the United States and add to economic growth, rather than leaking abroad.

A broader look at the effects of better Buy America policies has been taken by Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute. In a late November post, Scott examined the impact of legislation proposed by Connecticut Democratic Senator Christopher S. Murphy that would close major loopholes in existing federal policies and raise the required U.S. content level from 50 percent to 60 percent.

His findings: Simply closing the biggest loophole would boost domestic manufacturing output by $8.5 billion annually (based on recent federal procurement rates) and therefore generate $13.5 billion in new overall growth each year (because increases in manufacturing output have a “multiplier effect” on the rest of the economy). On the employment front, the bill could generate up to 100,000 new manufacturing jobs. And the higher level of domestic content could add to the $160 billion worth of manufactures currently purchased annually by Washington under current Buy America rules, as well as to the jobs they create.

Compared to the size of the American manufacturing sector and the larger economy, these numbers are small. But as big as they are, total federal purchases were only 6. 5 percent of U.S. gross domestic product in 2013. As I have repeatedly written, trade policy overhaul that simply keeps the deficit from rising higher would have much bigger payoffs. How much longer before the president, the Congress, and most of the current crop of presidential candidates get the message?

Im-Politic: How Bernie Can “Win”

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2016 elections, amnesty, Bernie Sanders, Buy American, carbon tariff, China, climate change, Democrats, Donald Trump, energy, environment, fossil fuels, fracking, greenhouse gases, gun control, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, liberals, multinational corporations, natural gas, offshoring, Open Borders, Populism, progressives, third world, Trade, unions

Like Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders is doing such a good job of influencing the agenda of other 2016 presidential candidates (namely Hillary Clinton) that there’s no useful advice I can offer on that score. Yet the Vermont Senator still has a ways to go if he wants to generate more lasting change in American politics, and the recipe, not too surprisingly, is the inverse of that for Trump.

First, some background. I’ve had the privilege of working with Sanders firsthand on trade and jobs issues, and greatly admire his dedication to getting America’s international economic policies right. He’s not only been a longtime champion of this cause – he’s been a tireless worker as well. Sanders has also kept his focus squarely on the most important victims of offshoring-friendly and otherwise flawed trade policies – the American worker and the productive segments of the U.S. economy. That’s a refreshing change from most others on the leftward end of the political spectrum, who have consistently muddied both the politics and economics of trade issues by (wrongly) emphasizing the harm allegedly inflicted on developing countries by American and American-supported policies.

Even better, it’s already clear that Sanders recognizes the importance of generating crossover appeal. In addition to noting that many of his positions – like Wall Street reform – resemble those of real conservative populists, he has walked this walk on an important social/cultural issue: gun control. But if he genuinely wants to shake up American politics and not simply worry Clinton through next November, the Democratic contender needs to understand the game-changing potential of more realistic immigration and climate change policies.

Earlier in this year’s campaign, Sanders was chided by numerous progressives for being too quiet on immigration issues. Unfortunately, he responded with a June speech to Latino-American elected officials by appearing to pander to this Open Borders crowd. His trade policy position, however, makes clear how substantively mistaken these views are. In particular, as suggested above, he has recognized that failed U.S. trade policies have betrayed America’s “working people” by sending “their jobs…to China and Mexico….” (Although he’s also made some nods to “third world victimhood-mongering.”) Unlike Trump, moreover, he correctly targets multinational companies – not foreign governments – for most of the blame.

But why, in this case, does Sanders (along with most other liberal and Democratic party trade critics) now favor immigration policies that also will take more jobs from Americans, and drive wages down? If trade deals that, among other failures, make many more very low-paid workers in the third world much more available to U.S.-based businesses have these effects, why would immigration policies that literally encourage such workers to come to America produce different results?

In fairness, Sanders and other liberal immigration supporters have an answer: Foreign workers who come to the United States will be much easier to union-ize, and thus will earn higher wages, than their counterparts who remain abroad. But given the labor movement’s major and chronic failure to stem dramatic shrinkage – especially in the private sector – that clearly belongs in the wishful thinking category. Moreover, labor’s recent organizing successes have come almost entirely in service sectors that don’t face any foreign competition. As for parts of the economy that are heavily traded, like manufacturing, continuing new legal or illegal immigration influxes, along with amnesty, will surely intensify the competition for remaining domestic jobs and drive wages even lower.  

Further, as I’ve written, liberals’ claims that mass immigration can produce a new mass middle class overlook that their conception of mass immigration has no logical stopping point – and therefore is likeliest to furnish American businesses with not only huge, wage-killing labor gluts, but with huge, never-ending labor gluts.   

More important, in an election year, populist-minded voters on the Right are bound to reject this reasoning. For any hope of recruiting them to his ranks, Sanders’ immigration approach will need a thorough overhaul. And of course, by extension, this goes for any Democratic candidate.

Sanders has been one of Washington’s leading champion of high priority efforts to fight climate change, which means that re-positioning on this issue to broaden his base will be even more difficult than on immigration. But it could also pay some political dividends, and could be engineered in a way to satisfy at least some environmentally minded Democrats. In three related ways, moreover, the kinds of trade policies Sanders favors are very helpful.

First, Sanders should start emphasizing that one of the best ways to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions is to reduce China’s emissions – and that this objective in turns requires slowing down the Chinese export machine. I’ve long emphasized that, given the huge market for Chinese goods represented by the United States, American trade curbs would be a big environmental plus – whether put in place unilaterally, through sanctions on currency manipulation, or possibly better, through the kind of multilateral carbon tariff that even prominent economists are starting to favor.

Second, Sanders could win some business support for this approach by pointing out that, the less competition American businesses face from countries where environmental (and other) regulations are non-existent or not enforced, the more environmentally friendly regulation they could bear.

Third, as a strong opponent of trade decisions that have gutted the nation’s ability to administer strong Buy American regulations governing government purchases, Sanders will have no problem insisting that federal support for green manufacturing and technology be restricted to operations and facilities in the United States that employ American workers.

At the same time, Sanders will have to take much more seriously the inevitably dominant role fossil fuels will play in the country’s energy future for the foreseeable future, and his energy approach will need to make much more room for greenhouse-friendly natural gas in particular. As a result, he’ll need to view whatever pollution issues are posed by fracking not as an excuse to reject or neglect gas, but as a problem to be solved technologically.

The good news, in contrast to Trump, is that Sanders does seem to take advice from outside his ideological comfort zone and political base – his dealings with me and colleagues, when I worked at a small manufacturers’ organization, represent just one body of evidence. And representing even a small state like Vermont inevitably has exposed Sanders to the kinds of voters and their direct feedback that a one-percenter like Trump probably rarely encounters. For these reasons alone, he seems to be a more plausible candidate to help create an enduring populist alternative to the two major parties.

Just with my treatment of Trump, this analysis of Sanders’ chances doesn’t mean that I view him as an ideal candidate or, similarly, that I’m with him on most or even many issues other than those mentioned here. What it does signal is my belief that these two figures boast the potential to rework American politics by identifying crucial areas of overlap on the core pocketbook issues that are vital both to voters and to the nation’s future. Will they? Leaving aside their personal traits, recent history doesn’t provide many reasons for hope. But of course it’s precisely because meaningful change sometimes happens that we’ve had history in the first place.

Those Stubborn Facts: Walmart’s Fake Buy-AmericanCampaign

Tags

Buy American, domestic manufacturing, imports, Made in the USA, manufacturing, Stubborn Facts, Walmart

“Building on the success of last year’s ‘Made in the USA’ Open Call, Walmart is again reaching out to suppliers asking them to pitch products manufactured in the U.S.”

–IndustryWeek, May 27, 2015

Walmart’s Rank Among U.S. Importers, 2014: #1

Difference Between Walmart’s Imports & No. 2 (Target), 2014: Nearly 50%

Increase in Walmart Imports, 2013-14: 6%

Last Year Walmart Imports Rose This Much: 2005

(Sources: “Made in the USA Products on Walmart’s Wish List,” by Adrienne Selko, IndustryWeek, May 27, 2015, http://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/made-usa-products-walmarts-wish-list and “This Just In: Walmart is #1 Importer, AGAIN. Where are those American Manufacturing Jobs?,” The WalMart 1%, June 8, 2015, http://walmart1percent.org/author/krudiger/)

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: McCain’s a Pseudo-Hawk – at Best – on China

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Asia, Buy American, China, national security, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Senator Bob Corker, Senator Jack Reed, Senator John McCain, Senator Robert Menendez, South China Sea, technology transfer

John McCain wants us to think that he’s on the case for stronger national security policies once again. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the Arizona Republican and Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee – along with several colleagues – recently sent a letter to the Obama administration demanding that it develop “a formal policy and clearly articulated strategy to address” Chinese muscle-flexing in the South and East China Seas.

According to McCain and three other leading Senate national security voices, the strategy should entail

“specific actions the United States can take to slow down or stop China’s reclamation activities in the South China Sea; the possible benefits of releasing intelligence more regularly about China’s destabilizing behavior; what forms of security cooperation with China would be inappropriate to continue if land reclamation activities proceed and what forms of engagement might provide incentives for China to alter its behavior; the region’s Maritime Domain Awareness needs; how to help regional partners enhance their own capacity; and additional diplomatic engagement with ASEAN countries or others in the international community to support unimpeded access to the Indo-Pacific maritime commons.”

What none of the Senators mentioned were measures that might staunch the massive flow of American resources and technology that have helped create this Chinese challenge in the first place – or certainly enabled it to reach its current scale. None of the letter’s signers – in addition to McCain, Democrats Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Robert Menendez of New Jersey, and Republican Bob Corker of Tennessee – has been a leader on China or Asia issues. In fact, none of them has a particularly great record on the votes that over the past quarter century have fueled America’s enormous, growing trade deficits with the People’s Republic and thus spurred the flows of literally trillions of dollars into the Chinese government’s coffers, and militarily invaluable knowhow to its armed forces. (You can examine their records through the search engine here.)

But none has been as aggressive a champion of these potentially disastrously shortsighted policies as McCain – while simultaneously warning about the Chinese beast his decisions have so ceaselessly fed.  (Click here for my report on the Senator’s professed concern about counterfeit Chinese electronics components in American military systems – and on his responsibility for their prevalence as leader of the successful opposition to stricter Buy American requirements for the Pentagon.) It’s just more evidence that, however dreadful President Obama’s conduct of U.S. foreign policy, nothing we know about his Republican critics indicates they’d be an improvement.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why the Auto Boom Has Been So Hollow

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auto boom, auto parts, automotive, bailouts, Buy American, Cash for Clunkers, Detroit automakers, George W. Bush, imports, manufacturing, manufacturing renaissance, next-generation vehicles, Obama, trade policy, transplants, wages, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I’m happy to recommend two cheers for the Wall Street Journal reporters who have just told us that the ballyhooed boom enjoyed by the American automobile industry since the U.S. economic recovery technically began in mid-2009 has been marked by vehicles increasingly stuffed with foreign parts (which has held down potential production increases) and largely, as a result, by falling wages.

These reporters would deserve three cheers, however, if they’d written on the inevitability of these woefully subpar results when it counted, and especially about what needlessly sabotaged the domestic industry’s prospects from the get-go. The best timing, of course, would have been at the height of the financial crisis, when the Bush and Obama administrations both blew the opportunity to re-invent the nation’s crippled domestically owned auto sector as an industry capable of contributing to a real renaissance in manufacturing and a much healthier, production-based recovery.  And the industry’s emerging underperformance is rooted in offbase U.S. trade policies.

As I wrote back then, and later told Congress, neither president promoted auto rescue strategies dedicated to maximizing automotive output and employment. Rather, they deferred to World Trade Organization rules that prohibit member governments from discriminating in favor of domestically owned companies and factories in their economic policy making (but that are overwhelmingly honored in the breach outside the United States).

The result:  Both Presidents Bush and Obama refused to condition their bailout of the Big Three Detroit automakers on requirements that vehicle production at home be prioritized, and that the use of U.S.-made parts be greatly increased. Just as perverse was the impact on initiatives aimed at spurring the production of “next generation vehicles” that would curb oil use. They were structured in ways that made import-heavy foreign auto transplant operations eligible for subsidies. The Obama administration, therefore, had few options other than focusing on improving Detroit’s “competitiveness” by cutting its wage and pension costs.

The counterproductive results were visible by late 2009. As I documented, for fear of WTO-authorized retaliation, the “Cash for Clunkers” law intended to aid the industry by stimulating auto buying provided taxpayer subsidies for the purchase of imported as well as domestic vehicles. As a result, more foreign auto production (of parts as well as vehicles) was fostered than American production.

Today’s Journal piece does usefully update the foregone gains and damage done by Washington’s timid and shortsighted trade policies. U.S. auto parts imports hit a new record last year. The share of domestic content in American-made vehicles has never been lower. (This statistic, moreover, bizarrely includes Canadian parts.) U.S. automotive employment remains nearly 32 percent below its recorded (1999) peak – slightly more than total manufacturing employment during this period. Real wages during the current economic recovery are way off throughout the sector, and entry-level pay at at least some parts companies down to Wal-Mart levels.

Imagine, however, the effect had Journal journalists – as well as so many others – been paying attention when these trends were unfolding, and focused on the (at least debatable) government decisions behind them, rather than drinking so much of the Kool-Aid of manufacturing and automotive renaissances.

Im-Politic: Mainstream Conservatives’ Sovereignty Concerns are Way too Selective

Tags

American Enterprise Institute, Buy American, Constitution, COOL, Financial Stability Board, food safety, free trade agreements, G-20, Im-Politic, NAFTA, regulation, sovereignty, The Wall Street Journal, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Wall Street, World Trade Organization

Ever since the NAFTA negotiations launched the current era of U.S. trade policy 20 years ago, critics on both the left and right-wing fringes (and I’m not using the word pejoratively) of American politics have complained that many new trade deals have threatened American sovereignty. Joining this chorus over the years have been voices from the far right that have detected the same danger from international organizations like the United Nations. These critics, who typically finger one-world-er American officials as co-conspirators, invariably are dismissed by mainstream journalists and pundits as a paranoid “black helicopter crowd.”

So imagine how strange it is to see a member of the U.S. government’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) co-author an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal claiming that Washington has secretly outsourced some key financial regulatory authority to a little-known international body called the Financial Stability Board (FSB). According to SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher and former senior Treasury Department official Peter Wallison, the Obama administration :

“has consistently moved to implement the FSB’s decisions without telling Congress, or the public, that it regards the FSB’s decisions as binding. There’s a reason for this lack of candor. Congress has never endorsed the idea that FSB decisions are binding on U.S. agencies. The FSB’s authority, if any, flows from the G-20 [a grouping of the world’s 20 biggest economies]. Allowing its decisions to dictate U.S. policy means that an American president can create authority to issue domestic regulations simply by making an agreement with the G-20 or other foreign leaders.”

The purpose of this post isn’t to evaluate whether Gallagher and Wallison are right in contending that “This is a dangerous precedent. The FSB’s decisions cover the financial system. But there is nothing to stop similar agreements about the environment, telecommunications and other crucial matters if the precedent is allowed to stand. The result would unravel the separation of powers and the role of Congress in the U.S. constitutional system.”

Rather, the point is to ask where these two, and other establishment conservatives, have been for the last two decades – during which nearly any American laws and regulations having any effect on U.S. trade flows have been vulnerable to the decisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO). And to wonder whether they will finally take off their blinders?

The WTO technically cannot strike down U.S. policy decisions. But it can bring about their elimination, and prevent their enactment, by authorizing countries claiming to be victimized by these measures to respond with tariffs versus American goods and services aimed at their markets.

Nor is this a theoretical possibility. For example, the WTO right now is ruling on whether Washington can require food producers to tell U.S. consumers whence their products come.  And its rules helped President Obama and the offshoring lobby defeat proposals to broaden the Buy American requirements governing federal purchasing policies – which would have greatly increased U.S. production of real world goods and services, and employment in those sectors, at the depths of the Great Recession, when they were desperately needed. (In fact, they still are.) Stronger and wider Buy American rules would have limited multinationals’ ability to supply the U.S. government from their foreign factories and other facilities – at U.S. taxpayer expense.

Moreover, other U.S. trade agreements have generated the same dangers, thanks to dispute-resolution systems that give all signatories equal say and votes, even though the American market is invariably the largest single national market at stake.

In principle, Washington’s submission to these global organizations is constitutional, because American membership and participation were expressly approved by Congress. But how many legislators do you suppose actually read the full texts? And how many do you suppose believed then-U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, who championed the WTO’s creation with a classic piece of Clinton-style parsing: “[T]he WTO does not require the United States to change any law, regulation at the federal or state or local level as the result of any decision made under this use — dispute settlement process. That’s up to the Congress or other legislative bodies, whether or not they wish to take that act. We’ve not given up any sovereignty in that regard.”

Now of course, President Obama is asking Congress to approve another major trade agreement – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – that because of its sweeping regulatory scope arguably contains more threats to America’s sovereignty than the WTO. Yet both the Wall Street Journal editorial page staff that published the Wallison-Gallagher piece, and the American Enterprise Institute that employs Wallison, strongly favor TPP ratification. Which makes it hard to avoid concluding that they think it’s more important for the Constitution protect Wall Street than to protect American workers and the rest of the nation’s productive economy.