Free Republic

Despite having no authorization from Congress, the Bush administration has launched extensive working-group activity to implement a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada. The membership of the working groups has not been published, nor has their work product been disclosed, despite two years of massive effort within the executive branches of the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The groups, working under the North American Free Trade Association office in the Department of Commerce, are to implement the Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP, signed by President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas, on...

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced Monday that the Trump Administration will raise the cost of new single family homes in the U.S. as part of its promise to “make America great again.” Mr. Ross didn’t put it quite that way. He said the Administration will impose a 20% tariff on softwood lumber imports from Canada, which total about $5 billion at year. But that’s a lot of lumber and the tariff will add an additional $1 billion in new costs for U.S. construction. Most of those costs will be added to the price of new American housing, not counting the...

... Take steel, a Trump preoccupation. One reason for exceptions is that domestic manufacturers have limited capability to produce steel of certain strengths, thickness and flexibility. Most higher-strength steels used in thin-walled pipelines are made overseas. Retrofitting plants to produce a type of steel for one or two projects could delay construction and increase the cost. More U.S. workers would have to be retrained, which may not be practical in the short-term. So contractors often have no choice but to import foreign substitutes. The American Petroleum Institute chronicled some of these supply challenges in its response to Mr. Trump’s earlier...

Germany could take the United States to court if Washington goes ahead with plans to tax imports, Economy Minister Brigitte Zypries said Friday, hours before Chancellor Angela Merkel’s first meeting with Donald Trump. “I’m betting partly on reason and partly on the courts” to prevent a damaging trade war, Zypries told Deutschlandfunk public radio. The minister’s combative stance comes ahead of Merkel’s first meeting with Trump in Washington and a gathering of G20 finance ministers in Baden-Baden, western Germany, set to be dominated by the US president’s “America First” policy. […] If a US border tax was found to breach...

Being a world-class economist, my colleague Walter Williams spends much of his time asking probing questions. Here’s one that he posed to me recently by e-mail: Don: I don’t think there are tariffs on coffee and I know of no organization calling for coffee tariffs. I wonder why. Great, probing question. The answer is that there are very few coffee growers in the United States. In the U.S. states, coffee is grown commercially only in Hawaii. Coffee is also grown commercially also in Puerto Rico. The result of this small number of American coffee growers is that these growers are...

REMINDER – One of the larger hurdles President Trump faces is a need to re-educate an entire generation on a fundamentally new vision of the U.S. economy. A return to a Pro-Main Street, goods-based, manufacturing, technology, innovation and industry driven economic model. Interestingly, many people have referenced a 1991 (25 years old) video of Donald Trump testifying before congress – as evidence of him being tuned in to political consequences of economic activity. The entire video is well worth watching because it gives you insight into a very specific moment in time as they discuss the ‘Reagan era’ 1986 tax...

It’s well-known among people who bother to learn the facts that U.S. manufacturing output continues to rise despite the reality that the number of Americans employed in jobs classified as being in the manufacturing sector peaked in June 1977 and has fallen, with very few interruptions, ever since.Nevertheless, some people – for example, the Economic Policy Institute’s Robert Scott – continue to insist that the loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. is largely due to increased American trade with non-Americans. Other studies find empirical evidence that labor-saving innovation rather than trade is overwhelmingly responsible for the loss of manufacturing...

<p>President Donald J. Trump didn't wait long to act on one of his signature campaign promises, announcing just moments after being sworn in as the country's 45th president that the U.S. intends to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and that he will renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement "to give American workers a fair deal."</p>

The globalist modus operandi of handing over to the president immense powers to act unilaterally without Congress may now come back to bite them. During the recent presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump often railed against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), charging that it was hollowing out American industry, costing hundreds of thousands of Americans good-paying jobs, and promising to do something about it were he to be elected.Turns out, the provisions of NAFTA may very well allow President Trump to act on his own to change tariff rates, force negotiations to modify the pact, or even withdraw the...

PHILADELPHIA — President Trump plans to make Mexico pay for his border wall by imposing a 20 percent tax on all imports into the United States from Mexico, raising billions of dollars that would cover the cost of the new barrier. The proposal, which Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said the president discussed privately with congressional Republicans before giving remarks at a party retreat here, would be a major new economic proposal that could have far-reaching implications for consumers, manufacturers and relations between the two governments. Mr. Spicer said the 20 percent tax on annual Mexican imports would...

Good Evening/Night, WELCOME MARK LEVIN!

Multinational software giant SAP SE has called on the incoming Trump administration to rethink any punitive tariffs and tax policies as it sets out to create 10,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the next year. The firm, which currently serves 25 industries across 190 countries, aims to significantly boost its business in the U.S. over the coming 13 months, chief executive Bill McDermott told CNBC's Squawk Box at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. However, he said that he was worried that added taxes and tariffs could be "problematic" for these goals. "We obviously don't want to get...

A couple of years ago, free trade was seen as a key principle of the Republican Party. Then Donald Trump became the Republican nominee for president, and things got more complicated.

After Trump's Thursday morning twitter taunt targeted Toyota, when the President-elect warned Japan’s biggest carmaker that it will face heavy penalties if it chooses to make cars for the US market in Mexico, writing  "Toyota Motor said will build a new plant in Baja, Mexico, to build Corolla cars for U.S. NO WAY! Build plant in U.S. or pay big border tax", a tweet which sent shares of Japanese carmakers sliding on Friday with a 1.7% fall for Toyota, 2.2% for Nissan and 3.2% for Mazda, an angry Japanese government and corporate establishment pushed back against Trump’s criticism of...

In the latest not too subtle threat lobbed by China's official press aimed at Donald Trump, the mainland media warned the President-elect that he’ll be met with "big sticks" if he tries to ignite a trade war or further strain ties."There are flowers around the gate of China’s Ministry of Commerce, but there are also big sticks hidden inside the door -- they both await Americans," the Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper wrote in an editorial Thursday in response to Trump’s plans to nominate lawyer Robert Lighthizer, who has criticized Beijing’s trade practices, as U.S. trade representative.The latest lashing...

Who’s “we,” kemosabe? Twenty-four hours ago, over Ryan’s own objection, House Republicans were all set to revamp the Office of Congressional Ethics. Then Trump logged into Twitter and, three hours later, the plan was scrapped. Members of Ryan’s caucus were eager to reassure the media yesterday that it wasn’t Trump’s influence that made them reconsider, it was the barrage of angry phone calls their offices were getting from grassroots Republicans, but that seems to be a partial explanation at best: OVERHEARD in the Speaker's lobby: "The guy puts out a tweet and half our conference goes nuts. What are...

Among the first steps being floated by the incoming Trump administration is a 5 to 10 percent tariff on imports, implemented through an executive order. It’s the sort of shoot-first, ask-questions-later action that President-elect Donald J. Trump promised during the campaign. It’s also unconstitutional. That’s because the path to imposing tariffs — along with taxes and other revenue-generating measures — clearly begins with Congress, and in particular the House, through the Origination Clause. When presidents have raised (or lowered) tariffs in the past, they have tended to do so using explicit, if sometimes wide-ranging, authority from Congress. The founders thought...

Lots more nukes? 10 percent tariffs? Remember how the guy operates before you wet yourself Public statements affect different people in different ways. Since the news media think the world revolves around them - since how they react to something is obviously more important than anything else under the sun - they get quite exorcised whenever someone makes a public statement that strikes them as ill-considered. Donald Trump does that a lot. He talks (or more often, tweets) about halting immigration by Muslims. And about imposing tarrifs on foreign goods. This past week, if you listen to the media, Trump...

In the tweet heard round the world, Donald Trump threatened to slap a 35% tariff on companies that shift jobs overseas, then ship their goods back to the U.S. Since his election, the focus has been on the carrots Trump will offer to grow and protect America's manufacturing base: corporate tax cuts and possibly a side order of state tax incentives. That's the menu that will keep open a Carrier plant in Indiana... But now Trump is signaling a more combative approach... ...There will be a tax on our soon to be strong border of 35% for these companies," Trump...

WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders signaled on Monday that they would not support President-elect Donald J. Trump’s threat to impose a heavy tax on companies that move jobs overseas, the first significant confrontation over the conservative economic orthodoxy that Mr. Trump relishes trampling. “I don’t want to get into some kind of trade war,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and majority leader, told reporters in response to Mr. Trump’s threats over the weekend to seek a 35 percent import tariff on goods sold by United States companies that move jobs overseas and displace American workers. Speaker Paul D. Ryan...