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…

As 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…

The last blog pierced the China meme – the premise that we need to do trade deals with countries in order to keep China at bay.  But if trade deals with other countries aren’t the way to deal with competitive threats from China, what is? Part of the problem is that trade people look at…

The go-to talking point when a trade agreement is in trouble in the United States is to invoke the specter of China.  When TPP began to falter, the rallying cry for passage was that if we failed to seal the deal, China would score a win, not just commercially, but geopolitically as well.  At the…

Is short-termism on its way out? Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post has posited as much, in the wake of the departure of one CEO after another from White House advisory councils after the Charlottesville protests. He argues that this event is likely to be looked back upon as a turning point in the evolution…

The debate over trade policy seems to lead to only two possible views:  on one side, trade is responsible for the decline of the American middle class; on the other, trade is always beneficial, regardless of the rules.  Each side has a pejorative label for the other, so that we live in a world where…