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 Richmans' Trade and Taxes Blog

The People are Right: It's Time to Balance Trade -- we're published in the American Thinker this morning
Howard Richman, 4/5/2016

Here's how we begin:

Although Donald Trump (Republican) and Bernie Sanders (Democrat) have both made opposition to U.S. trade policy a major plank of their surprisingly successful presidential campaigns, most elite “opinion leaders” in the media and politics continue to at-best condescend to these messages as a working-class phenomenon -- a movement by the “losers” in trade that fails to recognize the counterbalancing winners.

Few in the elite have yet begun to question their faith in free trade. And, as a result, it is unlikely that Congress, the executive branch, and other power centers will engage in the important rethink of U.S. trade policy that the public is calling for. Like Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz in the current campaign, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Barack Obama in 2008, they give lip service to trade concerns, while planning to continue “free trade” policy once elected. But the voters are right, the elites are wrong. The trade jobs ‘winners’ are vastly outnumbered by those who lost millions of jobs. Why the mismatch? Our massive trade deficits.

If there is a single statistic that shows the major cause of the current malaise -- and surely it has many causes -- the trade deficit is foremost. It has worsened since 1975, as shown in the following graph:

To read it, go to:

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/04/the_people_are_right_its_time_to_balance_trade.html