What Buy American Provisions Are

Buy America provisions require the federal government to give an advantage to domestic suppliers in government contracting. In other words, when the government decides how to spend taxpayers’ dollars, it is required to favor American businesses and American products. These provisions first appeared in the Herbert Hoover administration and went along with other protectionist measures like the Smoot-Hawley tariffs to fight the Great Depression. That bundle of beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism is generally seen today as worsening rather than alleviating the Great Depression. While other protectionist policies were abandoned over time, the Buy America provisions have survived in various forms ever since and have recently been favored by Presidents of both parties. President Trump frequently bragged about his expansion of Buy American provisions as part of his broader attack on international commerce. President Biden has, if anything, tried to outbid Trump on this issue. The major thrust of that Executive Order that I mentioned earlier was in its rules on content and waivers. Previously, only half of a product’s value needed to be U.S.-made to count and it was not terribly difficult to get a waiver. The Executive Order tightened the rules on measuring value and on granting waivers. Just last week, the Biden administration once again increased the regulatory threshold on content. President Biden’s left-wing nationalism may be less abrasively expressed than Trump’s America First rhetoric, but it’s still economic nationalism and is no less harmful because it gets served with progressive rhetorical accoutrements.

Why Buy American Provisions are Bad

At a practical level, these regulations cause more problems than they solve. The Executive Order is in some ways representative of Biden’s broader protectionism and manufacturing-oriented economic nostalgia. But the ostensible purpose of the EO, i.e. “to save American manufacturing”, is addressing a problem that does not even exist. Manufacturing isn’t suffering. It’s manufacturing employment that is down. As you can see from these charts, output and productivity both rose in the 1990s and 2000s and have held steady since but the number of jobs in manufacturing has fallen from roughly 18 million to roughly 12 million.

That 90s and 2000s’ rise in output and productivity was due to a burst of productivity-enhancing automation. That automation also ate a lot of jobs. Most manufacturing job losses, especially outside of textiles and furniture, is related to automation, not trade. Buy American provisions don’t do anything about that. So, in an important sense, the origin of Biden’s Buy American stance is a fundamental misdiagnosis of what has driven the decline in manufacturing jobs. Indeed, the whole intellectual construct behind much of the rhetoric around Buy American provisions- i.e. that policies like these will recreate the halcyon days of yore with lots of manufacturing jobs- is misguided smokestack chasing. The challenge is not in how to bring back the 1970s but how to help us all prepare for tomorrow.

Buy American rules aren’t just off-base, they are actively harmful. By driving up input costs for businesses and encouraging other countries to retaliate with their own discriminatory procurement policies, they destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs. This is critical to underline. The rules are promoted as a pro-jobs policy but they are, in reality, job killers. When you think of Buy American rules- you should think of policies that both raise costs and kill jobs.

Buy America provisions also drive up costs for government projects. Let’s say that Minneapolis wants to expand its light-rail system to promote mass transit and combat climate change. Buy America provisions force it to buy U.S.-made trains even if Japanese trains are better and cheaper. These costs add up. By one estimate, they are the equivalent of a 25 percent tariff on federal purchases and 10 percent on state-level purchases. Progressives generally want there to be more public goods. Making those goods cost more than they need to directly undermines the goal of providing more of them. Matthew Yglesias succinctly summarizes the problem here; the point of procurement is “quality service provision, not make-work jobs.” 

Americans also generally want government spending to be as efficient as possible. Enacting rules that force government to pay 25 percent more for goods and services than it needs to runs directly counter to that, and the numbers on this are not small. According to one estimate, Buy American cost taxpayers $94 billion in 2017 alone.

On top of all that, these provisions do not tend to actually lead to companies choosing to re-shore, which is their ostensible purpose. Finally, the notion that Buy American provisions or any form of protectionism is a way to fight inflation is pure malarkey. Buy American rules quite literally push prices up. It’s just bank-shot rhetorical nonsense to argue that Buy American rules will lead to reshoring and that then will make prices go down. If reshoring were a way to cut costs, companies would already be doing that- without the Buy American rules. 

These Buy America provisions, like much other protectionism, are often ostensibly aimed at China, but mostly end up hitting Canada and our European allies. That doesn’t help build an international coalition to respond to the rise of an illiberal China and a reckless Russia. Trade promotion and international interconnection isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about tying countries together to promote peace, interdependence, and cultural exchange. The construction of the US-led liberal international order is one of the great achievements of the 20th century. Buy American provisions are thus not just counterproductive policies, they are also antithetical to the liberal internationalism that progressives ought to value.

So, in sum, Buy American provisions raise government’s and business’ costs unnecessarily, solve a problem that doesn’t exist (manufacturing decline), don’t help with the problem that does exist (inflation), kill jobs, encourage retaliation, and undermine our alliances.

Broader Pathologies

The underappreciated drawbacks of Buy America provisions underscore two broader pathologies in our political culture: a militant aversion to owning up to tradeoffs, and aesthetic-driven policymaking. Biden wants to be a pro-labor union president and, at the same time, his chief economic problem is inflation. Rather than accept that there is some tension between those two goals, his response has been to insist, against all economic logic, that there is in fact no tradeoff between them. With a straight face, he actually said businesses should “lower their costs, not wages” as if somehow wages are not an important component of a firm’s costs. It would be one thing to say that manufacturing jobs are so important that we ought to accept higher costs as a tradeoff for those jobs (setting aside the earlier points about re-shoring and job killing). It is quite another to insist that economic gravity doesn’t apply simply because one doesn’t want it to. That unblinking populist insistence that tradeoffs do not exist is possibly why Buy American provisions poll so well. The way Biden makes it sound, Buy American rules are a ‘free lunch for Americans’ policy- with the billed footed by corporations and foreigners. Unsurprisingly, free lunch on someone else’s dime polls really well! But in reality, it is not on someone else’s dime, it is Americans who pay that lunch tab.

A second pathology is the instinct, common on parts of both the right and the left, to manipulate markets so as to deliver economic benefits to groups associated with favored cultural aesthetics. That is, rather than the state directly providing assistance to those groups or allowing the market to function unimpeded, the state is called on to tinker with the market so as to channel economic benefits toward that favored group. At a philosophical level, that seems unobjectionable, but in practice that bodog casino brings along two big problems. The first is the way in which some groups, whether that’s unions for economic leftists or culturally extolled professions like coal miners for populist nationalists, get showered with policy goodies while everyone else gets left out and gets to pay higher prices. That’s cronyism by another name.

The second problem is that optimizing policy based not on how it performs but how it sounds as a slogan makes it very easy to overlook the ways in which those policies can do more harm than good. That’s bad. It should be the aim of government to help people, not to pretend to help them while actually hurting them. Buy American provisions are thus akin to patting a worker on the back while you steal twenty dollars from his wallet. That’s the exact kind of behavior we all expect from Donald Trump, but Joe Biden should be better than that.

Part of the reason that Buy American provisions garner political backing is that they combine the right’s penchant for jingoism with the left’s penchant for rules proliferation. Neither of those instincts are helpful in a broader sense and both are driving this specific unhelpful policy. Progressives ought to push back against the jingoism inherent to Buy American rules while libertarians ought to push back against the unnecessary rules-proliferation they represent. Both groups should be relentlessly pointing out the extent these policies do not work as advertised and the extent to which they cause other problems. By doing that, a libertarian-progressive perspective helps guide the way to better policy rather than bad policy that happens to make for a better slogan.  

Gary Winslett is an Assistant Professor professor at Middlebury College and the Editor of the LP Papers.

To read the full commentary from The Libertarian-Progressive Papers, please click here. 

The post bodog online casino|Welcome Bonus_may be less abrasively appeared first on Bodog.

Local content requirements can help reverse our dependence on foreign nations both by discouraging multinational corporations from relying on fragile global supply chains, and also encouraging them instead to build productive capacity in the United States. They will increase certainty by reducing the likelihood of shortages and scarcity and the price swings like we see today. With this approach, we can exchange volatility for stability in our markets, and industrial decay for industrial strength.

To read the full commentary on the New York Times, please click here.

The post Bodog Poker|Welcome Bonus_governs federal government appeared first on Bodog.

Based on the wording of the WRO, we believe it is likely that more and broader import controls on equipment critical to the solar industry may follow.

Separately, the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security has designated Hoshine Silicon Industry (Shanshan) and four other Xinjiang companies to the Entity List. Generally, no person may export or reexport commodities, software, or technology subject to U.S. export controls to companies on the Entity List.

Finally, the U.S. Department o of Labor published a notice that updates its “List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor.” That list now includes polysilicon produced with forced labor in the PRC. Normally, the Department of Labor updates its list every two years. The fact that this updated is the first made outside of that two-year cycle, demonstrates how seriously the Biden administration takes the ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other minority groups in Xinjiang. It also signals that further restrictions on imports from and trade with the Xinjiang region are likely to follow.

What is a WRO?

CBP can withhold release of imported goods when information “reasonably but not conclusively” indicates that the merchandise was produced using forced labor. Forced labor is defined as “all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty for its nonperformance and for which the worker does not offer himself voluntarily” as well as forced child labor or indentured child labor.

A WRO prevents the goods from entering the United States. Importers have two options: either export the shipments back out of the United States, or submit information showing that the goods were not made with forced labor. If an importer pursues the latter option, it must do so within 3 months of importation and submit a certificate of origin as well as a detailed statement demonstrating that the subject merchandise was not produced with forced labor, e.g., a supply chain audit report.

More Anti-Forced Labor Actions to Follow

Bills working their way through the U.S. House and Senate would impose various restrictions related to China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, including prohibiting certain imports from Xinjiang and imposing sanctions on those responsible for human rights violations there.

The legislation, or further executive actions could prohibit the entry into the United States of goods manufactured or produced in Xinjiang unless CBP (1) determines that the goods were not manufactured by convict labor, forced labor, or indentured labor under penal sanctions; and (2) reports such a determination to Congress and to the public.

Additionally, the legislation could require issuers of securities to file annual or quarterly reports with the Securities Exchange Commission to disclose instances where the issuer knowingly engaged in activities related to Xinjiang such as working with an entity building detention facilities or surveillance systems there. The President would then review those disclosures to determine whether sanctions or criminal charges are warranted.

How the Renewables Industry is Responding

We understand that U.S. renewable energy industry associations are working with foreign suppliers of modules and other silica-based goods. The goal is to identify suppliers that are able to certify that their goods are free of forced labor, and to enable those suppliers to adequately document their processes.

In our view, these efforts are important. One difficulty, though, is that CBP is poorly staffed to respond to forced labor issues on large scales, and the timing of U.S. renewable energy project imports are often tight. So it remains to be seen whether proactive solutions can be established in time, at the right scale, to protect future imports to supply the industry.

Reid Whitten is the Managing Partner of Sheppard Mullin’s London office, practicing in international trade regulations and investigations.

Scott Maberry is an International Trade partner in the Government Contracts, Investigations & International Trade Practice Group in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office. Scott is a founding member of the Sheppard Mullin Organizational Integrity Group.

To read the original commentary from SheppardMullin, please visit here

The post bodog casino|Welcome Bonus_the import of silica-based appeared first on Bodog.

Last week’s report was prompted by two developments: the Covid-19 pandemic, which made us acutely aware of supply chain gaps and vulnerabilities in sensitive sectors, and China’s continuing dominance in production in some of these sectors. The latter is not new, but concern has been growing because of China’s dominant position in some areas like critical minerals processing and its demonstrated willingness to use denial of access as a means of responding to criticism or to further its foreign policy goals. In fairness, the United States probably weaponized trade before they did through our many sanctions programs, but when the shoe is on the other foot, it turns out it does not fit very well.

These developments have also made us acutely aware that our own efforts have been lagging. Manufacturing in some critical sectors has long been declining in the United States, as has our investment in basic research. In fiscal year 2019, federal spending for research and development (R&D) was 0.6 percent of GDP in the United States, the lowest in over 60 years. These challenges are acknowledged deficiencies and have been a wake-up call, to which the Biden administration has responded, first with its Build Back Better program and now with this report.

The 23 recommendations in the report represent a return to what used to be called industrial policy and might now best be described as innovation policy—a greater role for the government in promoting research in essential areas and, if necessary, promoting either onshore production or the development of secure supply chains based on relationships with trusted partners. The United States has done this before, and we are good at it. If we do it correctly, the result will be more resilient supply chains and a more secure America.

Whether their roadmap is the correct one, however, remains uncertain. Many of the recommendations address the need for pouring additional resources into our innovation efforts. Republicans have often opposed these policies in the past as government meddling in the economy and “picking winners and losers.” They may well do so again, particularly if their leadership adopts the position of opposing everything the president recommends, but this time the debate is taking place in the context of national security. We need to up our game, not just because it’s a nice idea, but because our security and ability to compete effectively with China demands it. Republicans in Congress who have taken a hard line on China—and criticized the president (incorrectly) for being too soft—may have difficulty opposing measures intended to do precisely what they have been demanding. More likely, as also happened last week in the Senate, they will moan, whine, delay, and tweak but in the end support ambitious innovation policy programs.

A more complicated question is how these measures interact with trade policy. While the report acknowledges that it is neither possible nor optimal for the United States to make everything it needs, the Buy America and reshoring policies recommended may ultimately make achieving greater supply chain resilience more difficult and more expensive. The old adage, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” comes to mind. One of the best ways to promote resiliency is to diversify sources of supply. While the report demonstrates an understanding of that, some of its proposals run counter to it. There has long been a tension between resiliency and efficiency in constructing supply chains, but the report basically pretends it isn’t there. Resiliency means more redundancy and having secure sources of supply, but secure sources are often not the cheapest, particularly if you compare domestic costs to foreign-sourced costs. Partly for that reason, CSIS has recommended a “trusted partner” approach which seeks to develop deep economic relations with reliable and secure foreign partners rather than trying to achieve autarky as much as possible. The report acknowledges this approach, but it remains to be seen if it is lip service or if a genuine effort to develop those partnerships will occur.

One clue about that is that the administration’s goals include creating jobs domestically and providing more rewards to our workers. Those are also noble goals, but they are not entirely compatible with either resiliency or efficiency. U.S. production will probably be more expensive and in the long run this may make our industries less globally competitive. In some circumstances like semiconductors, that is a price worth paying but in others perhaps not.

It would be helpful as the report’s recommendations are implemented if the administration did two things: first, recognize the tension between resiliency and efficiency rather than pretending we can have our cake and eat it too; and second, undertake the difficult task of defining which industries are essential to our national security. It has long been axiomatic in export control circles that if you try to protect everything you end up protecting nothing. The administration would be wise to take that to heart in its supply chain policy. If everything is critical, then nothing is critical. The essence of a smart supply chain policy is to set clear priorities.

William Reinsch holds the Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and is a senior adviser at Kelley, Drye & Warren LLP. Previously, he served for 15 years as president of the National Foreign Trade Council, where he led efforts in favor of open markets, in support of the Export-Import Bank and Overseas Private Investment Corporation, against unilateral sanctions, and in support of sound international tax policy, among many issues. 

To read the full commentary from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, please click here.

The post bodog casino|Welcome Bonus_end appeared first on Bodog.

“May this convention of union last 1,000 years,” the Ethiopian leader said, while Angola and Mozambique (still Portuguese colonies) along with South Africa and South Rhodesia (under apartheid rule) were fighting for their freedom.

Since then, that union has been succeeded by the 55-member African Union, “inspired by the noble ideals which guided the founding fathers of our Continental Organization and generations of Pan-Africanists in their determination to promote unity, solidarity, cohesion and cooperation among the peoples of Africa and African States,” according to its Constitutive Act.

If Africa seems geographically distant to Americans, it shouldn’t; the United States wouldn’t be what it is today without the labor force of Africans brought to the country as part of a bloody multi-century transatlantic trade. As the US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield recently pointed out, that experience is “just three generations back from me.”

Rather than being defeated by this mass depopulation—which cost it one-hundred million of its own, directly or indirectly, according to the macabre accounting of W.E.B Du Bois—Africa survived. Now it is the new frontier, full of all the promise presented by its youth, its dynamism, and its universalism despite the persistent presence of poverty on the continent.

As it re-engages with the world, Joe Biden’s United States will find a vigorous and uninhibited Africa, at least in the civil-society sector and among young generations, that does not expect leadership from the United States but rather a win-win partnership. With each passing day, Africa grows more critical for the United States in national-security and especially economic terms.

US policy in Africa has been thrown off course by China, which is methodically implementing a grand, 21st-century Marshall Plan for the continent through its Belt and Road Initiative. And Beijing is hardly to blame. As home to a large share of the world’s water resources, untapped arable land, and by 2050 nearly 25 percent of the world’s population, Africa has emerged as the most important piece on the geopolitical chessboard. Without a drastic shift in strategy, the United States is on the verge of being on the outside looking in for decades to come.

China is playing the long game in Africa and has strategically invested in infrastructure projects including railroads, ports, dams, and hydropower-generation sources. But these investments could be the warm-up act for China’s entry into fields traditionally dominated by the United States—namely technology and banking—where it aspires to compete with American heavyweights like Microsoft, Boeing, Google, and General Electric. Such game-changing moves would play into China’s larger ambition of unseating the US dollar.

All of these measures reflect the coming surge in economic demand from Africa. As the population grows, so too does its bodog casino pool of potential consumers and clients. The African middle class, which stood at 355 million people in 2010, will reach 1.1 billion by 2060.

From Morocco to Ethiopia, Africa has become the workshop of the world. It was home to six of the world’s ten most dynamic economies in 2018. The world’s largest free-trade zone—the African Continental Free Trade Area—was launched in 2019 to put an end to the dramatic effects of the old colonial policy that prevented Africans from trading with each other. A cosmopolitan billionaire class has sprouted, largely from the tech sector, as Africa has experienced the largest telecommunications revolution in the world. Kenya is a global leader in developing mobile-payment systems. Smart cities are cropping up in Ghana and Angola. And companies like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon invested two billion dollars in African tech ventures in 2019.

Encouragingly, the new generation of Africans driving this change do not want to live in a Leninist system. They want democracy, an open market, and free trade. This gives the United States an opening—if it is willing to act on it.

The Biden administration has sent strong signals that it is eager to engage. Biden earned positive reviews following his appearance at the 34th African Union Summit—his first international forum in office—during which he committed to stand as Africa’s partner and support African nations’ entrepreneurship and innovation.

A new policy toward Africa needs to chiefly reflect the realities that competition among global powers (Russia, Turkey, and others are vying with China for influence on the continent) and the major changes underway in African societies have a significant impact on the strategic long-term interests of the United States. The continent should be viewed through the lens of opportunity rather than risk. The Chinese have maximized the opportunity by being explicit with their investments, which prioritize long-term projects that minimize risk. As Senegalese President Macky Sall puts it, “What handicaps the continent is prejudice and the stigmatizing gaze on it. When it comes to investing in Africa, the perception of risk is always exaggerated, which further increases the cost of investment and debt. In fact, the risk in Africa is no higher than in many other parts of the world.”

China’s rapid advance in infrastructure investments will be difficult for Americans and Europeans to match. But Americans should invest in an area where they don’t yet have a competitor: cultural soft power. Fashion, entertainment, and even sports convey values of fair play, freedom, and success. During the Cold War, they enabled the American way of life to spread everywhere. Culture proved stronger than nuclear weapons. And that’s a good thing: Africa’s cultural industries are in dire need of investment. From the African Development Bank to the African Export-Import Bank, pan-African investors are working to address this. To launch this cultural and geopolitical revolution, the United States has a tremendous asset: its African American community, whose interest in the African continent is growing. Cooperation is beckoning from both sides of the Atlantic—from one new world to another.

Biden can further build ties with Africa by working to give its nations more influence on the global stage. He should do so not only because these countries have long been underrepresented within leading multilateral organizations—including the UN Security Council—but also because they offer innovative yet often unnoticed solutions to global challenges including terrorism, climate change, migration, debt, and COVID-19. African marginalization is no longer an option, and its nations will not soon forget who gave them a long-overdue seat at the table.

A new start with Africa is possible for the United States. It turns out that the world’s oldest continent is also the youngest. In this dual capacity, Africa has much to say. It’s time to listen to it.

Ambassador Rama Yade is the director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.

To read the rest of the commentary from the Atlantic Council, please visit here

The post Bodog Poker|Welcome Bonus_labor force of Africans appeared first on Bodog.

So common, in fact, that former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden – who share little common ground – have both promoted the concept.

Biden most recently made the case for buying American goods during his speech Wednesday night to Congress, selling it as a way to breathe more life into the U.S. economy.

But buying American is easier said than done, in no small part because the definition of an “American” product has been muddied in recent decades amid an increasingly globalized economy.

Biden said he has “strenuously” insisted that members of his administration direct their spending power, bolstered by his recent stimulus package, toward American goods.

The post bodog sportsbook review|Most Popular_As he said, though, the appeared first on Bodog.

Any presidency that cares about the survival of American democracy, let alone social justice, must assess its economic policies in terms of overcoming populism. The protectionist instinct rests on a syllogism: the populist anger that elected President Donald Trump was largely the product of economic displacement, economic displacement is largely the product of a laissez-faire approach to global competition, and therefore the best way to capture the support of populist voters is to firmly stand up against unfettered global competition. This syllogism is embraced by many Democrats, who are determined to recapture an industrial working-class base, and many Republicans, who use it as evidence that the government has sold out American workers in the heartland. For politicians of any stripe, playing to districts where deindustrialization has taken place seems to offer a sure path to election.

Every step of this syllogism, however, is wrong. Populist anger is the result not of economic anxiety but of perceived declines in relative status. The U.S. government has not been pursuing openness and integration over the last two decades. To the contrary, it has increasingly insulated the economy from foreign competition, while the rest of the world has continued to open up and integrate. Protecting manufacturing jobs benefits only a small percentage of the workforce, while imposing substantial costs on the rest. Nor will there be any political payoff from trying to do so: after all, even as the United States has stepped back from global commerce, anger and extremism have mounted.

In reality, the path to justice and political stability is also the path to prosperity. What the U.S. economy needs now is greater exposure to pressure from abroad, not protectionist barriers or attempts to rescue specific industries in specific places. Instead of demonizing the changes brought about by international competition, the U.S. government needs to enact domestic policies that credibly enable workers to believe in a future that is not tied to their local employment prospects. The safety net should be broader and apply to people regardless of whether they have a job and no matter where they live. Internationally, Washington should enter into agreements that increase competition in the United States and raise taxation, labor, and environmental standards. It is the self-deluding withdrawal from the international economy over the last 20 years that has failed American workers, not globalization itself.

To read the full piece by Foreign Affairs, please click here. 

The post bodog casino|Welcome Bonus_world appeared first on Bodog.

Covid-19 has depressed global trade greatly, but strategic and structural concerns about trade will outlive the virus. The Trump administration had a huge impact on trade, from waging a trade war with China to ratcheting up anti-free trade rhetoric and levying tariffs against China, Canada, Mexico, and the European Union.

Under President Joe Biden, U.S. trade policy will change greatly, although not immediately. President Biden has made abundantly clear that his first priority is the Covid-19 pandemic, and his $1.9 trillion stimulus plan will dominate economic policymaking for weeks. Even if President Biden does not materially address trade policy until after the pandemic subsides, his remarks and nominees for international economic positions suggest what changes to U.S. trade policy he will make during the rest of his term. Three key areas are analyzed below through the lens of his personnel and policy choices to date.

(1) Integration of Trade and Other Strategies

President Biden and his nominees have signaled their intention to integrate trade into general national security strategy and economic policy. In her introductory remarks upon her nomination as President Biden’s U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), Katherine Tai described trade as being “like any other tool in our domestic or foreign policy,” a means rather than “an end in itself.” The nomination of Wally Adeyemo, President Biden’s selection for U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, also signals an integration between economic and national security policy; Mr. Adeyemo held numerous economic policy positions in the Obama administration, including Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economics, a position on the National Security Council (NSC).

Biden’s intention to integrate trade into broader strategies would pivot from President Trump’s approach. President Trump often spoke about trade surpluses as ends themselves, and his administration closed the NSC’s Office of International Economics. This abolished the position Mr. Adeyemo held in President Obama’s NSC.

President Biden’s appointments this far also reveal that his trade and security strategy will include a focus on domestic economic concerns. Weeks after being announced as Biden’s choice for National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan gave a far-ranging interview with NPR in which he articulated a view of foreign policy that incorporates and prioritizes the economic concerns of middle-class Americans, and President Biden expressed a similar focus throughout the 2020 campaign. This framework reflects Mr. Sullivan’s recent work: after serving as a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, he led a project on foreign policy and the middle class at the Carnegie Endowment, which Press Secretary Jen Psaki recently tweeted about Ms. Tai will also surely bring domestic economic concerns to trade negotiations. As Chief Trade Counsel to the Chairman and Democratic Members of the House Ways and Means Committee, she advocated for labor and environmental protections in the recent U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement (USMCA).

(2) New Free Trade Agreements

Free trade agreements (FTA’s) are notoriously difficult to negotiate and ratify even in the best of times. The pandemic means new FTA’s will not come soon, and Biden has indicated as much. He has repeatedly said he will not focus on FTA’s in the near-term, instead directing his energy to address Covid-19 and domestic issues. However, Biden’s personnel choices suggest renewed opportunities for FTA’s later in his term.

Although the Trump administration negotiated and ratified the USMCA and phase one of a free trade agreement with China, they also abandoned FTA’s the Obama administration had initiated. In January 2017, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the FTA the Obama administration had negotiated with 11 Pacific nations, comprising 40% of global GDP. Trump also ended negotiations the Obama administration had begun with the European Union for an FTA, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Key members of Biden’s incoming team have a wealth of experience with FTA’s. During his time in the Obama Treasury Department, Mr. Adeyemo served as the chief negotiator for the TPP’s provisions on macroeconomic policy. Additionally, Ms. Tai worked on the USMCA for the Ways and Means Committee.

Recent FTA’s indicate where new agreements under the Biden administration may emerge. The U.S. and the U.K. have not agreed to an FTA, although they have had initial rounds of negotiations, so a new agreement may be on the horizon. The United Kingdom and the EU agreed to an FTA in December 2020. The U.S. and the EU also still do not have an agreement, though the EU seems open to new FTA’s. In December 2020, the EU released a blueprint for the transatlantic partnership, specifically mentioning Biden’s election as a key opportunity to strengthen relations. It remains to be seen how willing the EU is to start negotiating any deal until the U.S. lifts its steel and aluminum tariffs. However, President Biden’s recent recommitment to the Paris Climate Accord is likely a necessary, if incremental, first step because some EU member states require another country’s ascent to the accord as a precondition to an FTA. Additionally, in November 2020, the U.S. and the EU agreed to a mini-FTA for lobsters. The EU also agreed to an FTA with Canada in 2017.

President Biden may pivot back to Asia for an FTA. Since President Trump abandoned the TPP in 2017, the TPP’s other member countries have enacted an FTA without the United States. Labor provisions could be a concern for an American FTA with Asian countries, but Ms. Tai’s experience addressing labor concerns in FTA’s would equip her well to do so again. Mr. Adeyemo’Bodog Poker s experience with the TPP for the Obama administration would also prove relevant to renewed FTA efforts in Asia. Finally, an FTA with Asian countries would offer a bulwark against China, so this could support the administration’s broader China strategy.

(3) Currency Manipulation?

A key area to pay attention to in any FTA’s the Biden administration negotiates is currency manipulation. In a trade context, currency manipulation allows a country to artificially lower the prices other countries pay for their products. This makes the country’s exports unfairly competitive. In this way, exchange rate policy is trade policy.

Currency manipulation has gained political salience in recent years. President Trump accused China of manipulating its currency many times. In 2019, the Trump Treasury Department officially labeled China a currency manipulator and did the same to Vietnam and Switzerland in December 2020.

Biden officials have said they prioritize addressing currency manipulation, but their specific plans have not been revealed. During the campaign, President Biden committed to “aggressive trade enforcement” actions against Chinese currency manipulation, and in her confirmation testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, Dr. Janet Yellen, President Biden’s Treasury Secretary, said she supports efforts against countries’ currency manipulation that seeks “an unfair trade advantage.” Ms. Tai served as the head of U.S.-China trade enforcement at USTR, and Mr. Adeyemo has also warned against currency manipulation many times.

However, Mr. Adeyemo’Bodog Poker s experience with the TPP may prove most relevant to currency manipulation. Mr. Adeyemo served as deputy chief of staff to former Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, and upon President Biden’s announcement that he would nominate Mr. Adeyemo as Deputy Treasury Secretary, Mr. Lew praised Mr. Adeyemo’s work negotiating a deal for greater foreign exchange policy enforcement in the macroeconomic declaration that accompanied the TPP. The Wall Street Journal identified Mr. Adeyemo’s role similarly.

Three critical points emerge from this declaration. First, it affirms that each TPP country will avoid unfairly manipulating exchange rates, particularly for competitive purposes. Second, it requires each TPP country to promptly disclose data regarding their foreign-exchange reserves, IMF assessments of their exchange rate, and foreign-exchange intervention their government enacts. Finally, it establishes regular dialogue between officials of all TPP countries about macroeconomic and exchange rate policies. This framework could help shape the Biden administration’s approach to currency manipulation in trade agreements, and Mr. Adeyemo appears well-positioned to lead those efforts due to his experience working on these provisions.

Conclusion

In his prolific biographies of President Lyndon Johnson, historian Robert Caro puts forth a corollary to the aphorism “power corrupts.” Caro writes that power reveals, too. After three presidential campaigns across thirty years, Mr. Biden finally holds the office and wields its power. Ultimately, his power over trade will reveal his vision and priorities for the subject, but there will be few chances for major trade policy change until the pandemic abates. At present though, Biden’s personnel selections, namely Messrs. Adeyemo and Sullivan and Ms. Tai, signal that his administration will reframe U.S. trade strategy and address numerous structural trade issues. Personnel does not reveal as clearly as power does, but personnel does preview.

To view the original blog post, please click here. 

The post bodog poker review|Most Popular_(TPP), the FTA the Obama appeared first on Bodog.

The post bodog poker review|Most Popular_to the private sector appeared first on Bodog.

Biden signed an executive order on Jan. 25 meant to boost federal purchases of American-made products, to strengthen the U.S. manufacturing sector. Federal law already requires this, but waivers are available if U.S.-made products cost too much. The Biden order will make it harder to get a waiver, while also requiring more components inside finished products to be American-made instead of imported. There will also be a new White House office enforcing the rules and making sure purchasing agencies don’t cut corners.

It might be good politics, but it’s bad economics. “It’s not a job-creating approach,” says trade economist Gary Hufbauer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “You kill downstream jobs in one of two ways. Either you make it more expensive, so less of the downstream product is purchased, or if you have a given amount of budget money you’re spending on this Buy America package, it’s not available for other things to spend on. You just can’t build Bodog Poker as many miles of road when the price is higher.”

 

Buy America laws governing federal purchases have been on the books since 1933, and about 97% of federal goods purchased are assembled in the United States. Federal agencies can seek a waiver if a domestic product is considerably more expensive than a similar foreign product, with thresholds ranging from 6% more costly to 50%, based on the type of product. There are also rules requiring domestically produced components inside goods to be made in the United States, with 50% or 60% being common thresholds.

The Biden order doesn’t automatically set new targets, but it begins a process that will likely raise the the amount of domestic content required inside products considered made in America. Depending on the new targets, there could be significant changes for some sectors. “This is particularly true in the information and communications technology sector,” says William Reinsch of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a former undersecretary of commerce for exports. “If the government ends up changing the content rules, that could result in a major upset of existing supply chains and have a big economic impact.”

Raising costs, depressing output

 

Most types of protectionism that limit competition raise prices, which is why several studies show that Buy America provisions depress economic output and overall employment. In most cases, it simply costs more to build stuff in the United States than in China, Mexico or other offshore havens manufacturers have flocked to during the last 30 years. The higher U.S. cost of rebar or piping or tires or solar panels protects those U.S. jobs, but it also raises the cost of projects and introduces distortions that undermine the whole point of the program.

The Peterson Institute estimates that each job protected by Buy America provisions already on the books costs $250,000 in taxpayer subsidies and lost output. A 2018 Canadian study found that Buy America policies protect about 57,000 U.S. jobs, but eliminating them completely would create 300,000 new jobs, on net. Canada routinely criticizes Buy America policies, since Canadian producers lose out, and the country’s foreign minister said on Jan. 25 she was concerned Biden’s new order could harm trade between the two countries.

Tougher Buy America provisions are a small part of Biden’s broader economic plan, and something he can implement quickly, without Congressional legislation. The measure will appease some liberal Democrats who favor more protectionism and would even like to see President Trump’s new tariffs on imports from China and other countries remain in place.

A much bigger challenge for Biden will be trade reforms that harness the power of free trade, which allows companies to organize themselves in the most efficient manner, while developing new ways to protect workers whose jobs are threatened by those same efficiencies. Most economists agree that free trade allows producers to get the most bang for the buck, but the United States has done a notoriously poor job of helping workers whose jobs go overseas. The decline of good-paying blue-collar jobs, with little to replace them, is one factor that fueled the Tea Party populism that ultimately helped Donald Trump win the presidency in 2016.

Biden says he wants to confront China on trade abuses in alliance with other nations, instead of the unilateral approach President Trump favored. But he hasn’t outlined a detailed plan on trade, and it will take time at any rate. His Build Back Better program calls for trillions of dollars in new investment in green energy and other parts of the economy that could fuel a manufacturing boom—but only if reluctant Republicans in Congress go along with the spending. Until then, Biden hopes voters will buy his Buy America plan.

To read the original piece from Yahoo Finance, please click here

Rick Newman is a columnist for Yahoo Finance, offering insightful, provocative takes on many of the biggest stories of our time. He was previously Chief Business Correspondent, and before that Pentagon correspondent, for U.S. News & World Report. He’s also the author of four books, including Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success.

The post bodog casino|Welcome Bonus_more components inside appeared first on Bodog.