Trade Archives - Page 19 of 27 - Progressive Policy Institute

Populism Watch: Combatting Protectionist Policies with a Positive Plan for Economic Progress

Posted on June 18, 2018September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

At the G7 Summit last week, Donald Trump’s fixation on tariffs, as well as his withdrawal of support for a Group of Seven communique, made waves. The President’s protectionist agenda could do serious and lasting damage to the U.S. economy, American workers, and the international relationships we’ve spent decades building. In response, pragmatic progressives should champion a genuine alternative economic platform focused on growth, expanded opportunity, and strengthening U.S. strategic alliances.

A 2016 report by the Progressive Policy Institute offers an approach to boosting the U.S. economy and middle class prosperity without threatening relations with key allies. The report, Unleashing Innovation and Growth: A Progressive Alternative to Populism, edited by PPI President Will Marshall, puts forth an optimistic plan to strengthen America’s economic and fiscal security–while improving vital trade and security ties with America’s G7 partners. The report speaks specifically against the kinds of protectionist policies Trump has instigated, instead encouraging the democratization of trade, the free flow of data across global borders, and the support for innovative trade agreements, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The report begins with a review of the specific economic challenges faced by the United States, including slow growth since 2000, stagnating wages and living standards, and a shrinkage of the middle class. These problems cannot be fixed by trade wars and isolationism, but rather, as the report explains, require a series of positive changes in American economic and regulatory policies.

The report proposes spreading innovation across the economy through the adoption of a new ‘Innovation Platform’ aimed at stimulating public and private investment in new ideas and enterprises. It also urges improving the regulatory climate impeding greater innovation in non-digitized industries and investment in small and new businesses. The report also proposes creating business incentives to offer more flexible work, including paid leave and overtime, for gig-economy workers. The plan also includes ways to increase renewable energy creation, modernize public works, improve K-12 education, and narrow the wealth inequality gap with universal pensions.

PPI’s blueprint underlines the issues that can arise from embracing populist policies, such as mistrust in democratic institutions and threats to economic and national security. The report is a reminder that smarter, optimistic policy alternatives to populism and nationalism can benefit all Americans, as well as our allies in the G7.

Three Threats to Liberal Democracy

Posted on June 18, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Trump petulantly attacked U.S. allies at the G-7 summit in Quebec, then dashed off to Singapore to heap praise on North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. You couldn’t ask for a more vivid illustration of the illiberal spirit that shapes his “America First” doctrine.

But Trump is hardly alone in embracing hyper-nationalism. According to PPI President Will Marshall, illiberal nationalism is the common thread running through the three most potent threats to the democratic world: the rise of national populism, especially in Europe; Russia’s reversion to despotism at home and adventurism abroad; and, the emergence of China’s autocratic capitalism as a plausible alternative to market democracy.

Marshall elaborated on the dangers of neo-nationalism in comments prepared for the Biennial Colloquy on the State of Democracy, organized in Rome this spring by the Centro Studi Americani. That commentary follows:

PPI Statement on Trump Administration’s New China Tariffs & China’s Announced Retaliation

Posted on June 15, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Ed Gerwin, Senior Fellow for Trade and Global Opportunity at the Progressive Policy Institute, released the following statement in response to the Trump Administration’s announcement of new tariffs on Chinese-origin imports and China’s announced retaliation:

“China’s technology mercantilism is a serious threat to America’s economic future that requires a tough and effective American response, but the Trump Administration’s announcement today of $50 billion in duties on Chinese-origin products is not even close to that response.

“Making American businesses and working families pay billions in new trade taxes won’t change China’s bad behavior. Instead, China will respond—as it has already announced—with billions in targeted retaliatory tariffs that will make it much harder for American manufacturers and farmers to export there. It cannot be overstated—these tit-for-tat tariffs will destroy jobs and devastate communities throughout the United States.

“Responding to China’s unfair trade practices and technology theft with “America First” protectionism is a terrible mistake. The Administration’s deeply flawed and poorly focused strategy—based on duties that damage America’s economy and “go-it-alone” trade policies that alienate vital allies—will have large-scale and long-term repercussions.

“Instead of instigating trade wars, the United States should confront China’s unfair trade practices with a targeted, long-term response that enlists our international allies, enforces current trade rules and writes new ones, focuses negotiations on key issues, and ratchets up pressure on China—all while advocating aggressively to keep global markets open. PPI will outline such a strategy in a new report to be released next week.

“Open global markets are manifestly in America’s interest. Given a level playing field, America’s innovative businesses can compete and win anywhere. In trade wars, nearly everyone loses.”

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Ritz for NY Daily News, “How Trump and Republicans are damning Social Security and Medicare”

Posted on June 14, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

When the Social Security and Medicare trustees warned last week that both programs are on tenuous financial footing, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said: “The administration’s economic agenda — tax cuts, regulatory reform and improved trade agreements — will generate the long-term growth needed to help secure these programs and lead them to a more stable path.” He couldn’t be more wrong.

As more and more baby boomers retire, Social Security and Medicare will require additional revenue just to fund the same level of benefits enjoyed by previous generations. Yet instead of raising more revenue to help fund these programs, the Trump administration and Congressional Republicans recklessly pursued a package of tax cuts that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projects will reduce revenue by $2 trillion over the next decade. This law put Social Security and Medicare on a decidedly less stable path.

Continue reading at the New York Daily News.

Gerwin for The Hill, “It’s time for Congress to step in and stop Trump’s trade abuses”

Posted on June 6, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Donald Trump and his court appear to believe that the president has near absolute power over trade. After Trump ordered tariffs on imported aluminum and steel, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross noted that Trump could alter the tariffs or impose quotas or “do anything he wishes at any point.”

Trump recently launched an investigation to limit car imports on “national security” grounds and reportedly told French President Macron that he aims to push German carmakers out of the American market altogether.

But Trump and his team are mistaken. Under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress has the power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.” The president’s powers over trade — including his authority to enter into trade agreements and impose tariffs — are delegated by Congress under various laws.

Continue reading at The Hill.

Marshall for New York Daily News, “Trump’s petulant Iran deal pullout: He has no clue what comes next”

Posted on May 9, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Trump seems determined to keep his dumbest 2016 campaign promises. First, he pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is designed to create a strong economic counterweight to China.

Then, he pulled us out of the Paris climate accord, essentially signaling that the United States will not cooperate with the rest of the world to combat global warming. Now, he’s made good on his threat to pull the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal — like the other two deals, painstakingly negotiated by President Obama.

Trump’s actions constitute not only a repudiation of America’s international leadership role, but of international cooperation itself. Instead, United States seems to be adopting a strategically clueless policy of belligerent unilateralism.

Continue reading at the New York Daily News.

Marshall for The Daily Beast, “Democrats Shouldn’t Help Trump Build Walls”

Posted on March 12, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Donald Trump loves walls and he loves tariffs, which are walls of another kind – barriers to open trade. In his mind, walling off the outside world is the key to making America great again.

From this warped perspective, his decision last week to slap tariffs on steel and aluminum imports makes perfect sense. But it has provoked strenuous objections from Republican and business leaders and most economists, not to mention U.S. allies and trading partners.

All this political blowback looks like a gift to Democrats, but there’s a hitch: The party doesn’t know its own mind on trade. Polls show sizeable majorities of rank and file Democrats favor free trade. But the national party’s message is dominated by a militantly anti-trade faction led by organized labor, Rustbelt politicians and left-wing populists. This group, in fact, seems to be offering the only praise for Trump’s tariffs.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast.

Gerwin for The Hill, “‘Go-it-alone’ trade strategies are neither wise nor effective”

Posted on March 8, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

On March 1, after weeks of “absolute chaos” within his administration, Trump held a hastily arranged “listening session” with metals executives.

Trump announced — to the surprise of his staff — that he’d be imposing import tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum, and that these tariffs would last “a long period of time.” Trump reportedly chose 25 percent duties because a round number “sounds better.”

Reaction to Trump’s informal announcement was swift, widespread — and harsh. The stock market, which Trump cites as confirmation of his economic genius, plunged 420 points. The Wall Street Journal called the tariffs the “biggest policy blunder” of Trump’s presidency.

Continue reading at The Hill.

Gerwin for the WSJ, “In America’s Absence, the TPP Goes On”

Posted on March 8, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The remaining 11 countries are to sign a renegotiated deal Thursday. U.S. companies will suffer.

When President Trump announced the U.S. would pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in January 2017, he likely thought he’d consigned the proposed trade pact to history’s dustbin. After all, America was by far the largest and most influential country set to participate.

But TPP lives on. Its survival illustrates how the Trump administration’s “America First” trade policies are isolating the U.S. and how other potential miscalculations—especially terminating the North American Free Trade Agreement—would further distance American businesses and workers from vital global opportunities.

On Thursday the 11 remaining countries will sign a renegotiated version of TPP. Now called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP-11, the agreement creates a free-trade area comprising half a billion people and one-seventh of the global economy.

Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal.

Bledsoe for The Hill, “Solar case shows climate protection requires globalized economy”

Posted on February 20, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Responses to President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on Chinese solar panels fall into two general camps.

One holds that Chinese solar manufacturing subsidies are so egregious as to require U.S. tariffs to deter additional subsidies by Beijing. Others believe the action is really just free-trade political posturing by Trump, and in practice, amounts only to a self-inflicted wound on the rapidly growing U.S. solar installation sector.

Neither perspective accounts, however, for the recent history of U.S. and Chinese solar subsidies, or indeed new subsidies for carbon capture and other clean energy sources that became law in the recent budget agreement.

Continue reading at The Hill.

The App Economy in Thailand

Posted on January 25, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, that initiated a profound and transformative new economic innovation. While central bankers and national leaders struggled with a deep financial crisis and stagnation, the fervent demand for iPhones, and the wave of smartphones that followed, was a rare force for growth.

Today, there are 5 billion mobile broadband subscriptions, an unprecedented rate of adoption for a new technology. Use of mobile data is rising at 65 percent per year, a stunning number that shows its revolutionary impact. More than just hardware, the smartphone also inaugurated a new era for software developers around the world. Apple’s opening up of the App Store in 2008, followed by Android Market (now Google Play) and other app stores, created a way for iOS and Android developers to write mobile applications that could run on smartphones anywhere.

Regulation and the Productivity Revolution in Japan’s Handset Market

Posted on January 19, 2018 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Progressive Policy Institute has long been focused on the interaction between regulation and innovation across the United States, Europe, and Asia.We are particularly concerned with the broad class of pricing of innovative products and services.

From this perspective, we note that the Japanese government, acting through the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) and the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), has required or encouraged mobile providers to reduce or eliminate their subsidies for consumer purchases of smartphone handsets. The government’s explicit goal is to persuade the providers to use the money saved from reduced subsidies to lower rates for long-term consumers.

Happy Holidays from PPI

Posted on December 19, 2017September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s been a surreal political year, but PPI has much to celebrate this holiday season. Throughout 2017, we expanded our productive capacity and the scope of our political and media outreach significantly. For example, PPI organized 150 meetings with prominent elected officials; visited 10 state capitals and 10 foreign capitals, published an influential book and more than 40 original research papers, and hosted nearly 30 private salon dinners on a variety of topical issues.

Best of all, we saw PPI’s research, analysis, and innovative ideas breaking through the political static and changing the way people think about some critical issues, including how to revive U.S. economic dynamism, spread innovation and jobs to people and places left behind by economic growth, and modernize the ways we prepare young people for work and citizenship.

Let me give you some highlights:

This fall, David Osborne’s new book, Reinventing America’s Schools, was published on the 25th anniversary of the nation’s first charter school in Minnesota. David, who heads PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools project, documents the emergence of a new “21^st Century” model for organizing and modernizing our public school system around the principles of school autonomy, accountability, choice, and diversity. David is just winding up a remarkable 20-city book tour that drew wide attention from education, political, and civic leaders, as well as the media. Because David is a great storyteller, as well as analyst, it’s a highly readable book that offers a cogent picture of a K-12 school system geared to the demands of the knowledge economy. It makes a great holiday gift!

Dr. Michael Mandel’s pioneering research on e-commerce and job creation also upended conventional wisdom and caught the attention of top economic commentators. Dr. Mandel, PPI’s chief economic strategist, found that online commerce has actually created more jobs in retail than it destroys, and that these new jobs (many in fulfillment centers in outlying areas) pay considerably better than traditional ones. His research buttresses the main premise of PPI’s progressive pro-growth agenda: that spreading digital innovation to the physical economy will create new jobs and businesses, raise labor productivity, and reduce inequality.

PPI challenged the dubious panacea of “free college” and proposed a progressive alternative – a robust system of post-secondary learning and credentials for the roughly 70 percent of young Americans who don’t get college degrees. PPI Senior Fellow Harry Holzer developed a creative menu of ways to create more “hybrid learning” opportunities combining work-based and classroom instruction. And PPI Senior Fellow Anne Kim highlighted the inequity of current government policies that subsidize college-bound youth (e.g., Pell Grants), but provide no help for people earning credentials certifying skills that employers value.

Building on last year’s opening of a PPI office in Brussels, we expanded our overseas work considerably in 2017. In January, I endeavored to explain the outcome of the U.S. election to shell-shocked audiences in London, Brussels, and Berlin. In April, we led our annual Congressional senior staff delegation to Paris, Brussels, and Berlin to engage European policymakers on the French presidential election and other U.S-E.U. issues, including international taxation, competition policy, and trade. PPI also took its message of data-driven innovation and growth to Australia, Brazil, Japan and a number of other countries.

Other 2017 highlights included a strategy retreat in February with two dozen top elected leaders to explore ideas for a new, radically pragmatic agenda for progressives; a Washington conference with our longtime friend Janet Napolitano (now President of the University of California system) on how to update and preserve NAFTA; public forums in Washington on pricing carbon, infrastructure, tax reform, and other pressing issues; creative policy reports on varied subjects; and a robust output of articles, op-eds, blogs, and social media activity.

I’m also happy to report many terrific additions to PPI in 2017. Rob Keast joined to manage our external relations and new policy development; Paul Bledsoe assumed a new role as Strategic Adviser as well as guiding our work on energy and climate policy; and Emily Langhorne joined as Education Policy Analyst. We will also be adding a fiscal project next year.

All this leaves us poised for a high-impact year in 2018. In this midterm-election year, our top priority will be crafting and building support for a new progressive platform — a radically pragmatic alternative to the political tribalism throttling America’s progress. That starts with new and better ideas for solving peoples’ problems that look forward, not backward, and that speak to their hopes and aspirations, not their anger and mistrust.

It’s a tall order, and we cannot succeed without your help and support. Thanks for all you have done over past years, and we look forward to working with you in 2018.

Happy holidays and New Year!

How to Modernize and Strengthen NAFTA

Posted on November 17, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

If there is one thing that negotiators from the United States, Mexico and Canada agree on, it is that NAFTA should be updated and improved to the mutual benefit of the three partners. The question is how to do so. To grapple with that question, the University of California and Tecnológico de Monterrey, the largest not-for-profit private university in Mexico, in partnership with the Progressive Policy Institute and COMEXI (the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations), convened a gathering of high-level North American government and business leaders, diplomats and trade scholars at the university’s Washington, D.C. conference center on September 21, 2017. Negotiators from the U.S., Mexico and Canada convened in Washington on October 11th to resume talks on modernizing and strengthening the 1994 North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The impetus for these talks comes from

President Trump, who has fiercely criticized NAFTA and is demanding changes aimed at reducing U.S. trade deficits and “bringing back” U.S. manufacturing jobs. The Trump Administration wants to wrap up an agreement on a modified treaty by the end of the year.

That’s an ambitious timetable, considering the White House’s lengthy list of negotiating objectives — and concerns in Canada and Mexico that President Trump views trade as a zero-sum game. The unspoken question hovering over the talks is this: Can Trump find a way for America to “win” in trade without Mexico and Canada losing?

Gerwin for US News, “Trump the NAFTA Terminator”

Posted on November 15, 2017 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The president is making moves to terminate NAFTA without considering the economic and legal repercussions.

Donald Trump has few positive achievements as president. But the man famous for firing people has certainly shown a knack as a terminator: Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership and terminated a variety of other Obama administration initiatives.

Now, Trump is seemingly set on terminating NAFTA, which he’s derided as “the worst trade deal ever.” Congress must stop Trump before he kills again.

Congress has been remarkably mute on Trump’s threats to NAFTA, even though the Constitution empowers Congress “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations” and much of the president’s authority on trade is based on laws passed by Congress. It’s time for Congress to use its powers – and broader influence – to prevent Trump from damaging U.S. trade, destroying jobs and sowing economic uncertainty by recklessly withdrawing from NAFTA.

Continue reading at U.S. News.