Sunday, June 26, 2011

Sunday Quick Hits

Here's a whole lot of links to get your week started off right:
  • The Economist asks whether we're seeing the end of China's dominance as the world's low-cost manufacturer of first resort.
  • J.E. Dyer absolutely dismantles labor lawyer Thomas Goeghegan's lame defense of NLRB's indefensible attempt to stop Boeing from opening a new manufacturing facility in South Carolina.
  • GMU's Russ Roberts beautifully explains why President Obama's silly comments about ATMs taking American jobs are so darn silly.  (And Cato's Andrew Coulson piles on.)
  • The AFL-CIO's use of a 13-year old photo in its latest anti-Colombia FTA smear campaign is the perfect metaphor for its trade policy more broadly - stuck in the past.  Meanwhile, Colombia hits yet another labor benchmark that was supposed to ensure passage of its FTA with the United States.  Key words: supposed to.
  • AEI's Phil Levy provides a great roadmap showing how we got into the current mess re: Trade Adjustment Assistance and how we can get out of it.
  • And while TAA gums up passage of pending US FTAs, our potential FTA partners in South Korea and Colombia are lining up another, rather conspicuous suitor - China.  Awesome.
  • And the TAA/FTA impasse also has infected [$] ongoing US trade negotiations under the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  Double-awesome.
  • AEI's Mark Perry highlights the amazing gains in US worker productivity in our allegedly struggling manufacturing sector.
  • Cato's Dan Griswold shows how IBM's remarkable evolution is a perfect metaphor for the US economy.
  • Is America's stupid ethanol policy on the way out the door?  If this recent Senate vote is any indication (and it might not be), yes.
  • Can we please, PLEASE stop labeling free traders who support practical limits on US foreign policy adventurism "isolationists"?
  • Mark Perry and Dan Griswold team up to explain how people's blinkered obsession with the US trade deficit misses the other, inevitable side of the coin, our massive foreign investment surplus:

If these don't leave you sufficiently depressed about US trade policy, then nothing will. 

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