It’s no secret that I am no fan of President Barack Obama. Still, allowing our nation’s chief executive to negotiate trade deals with other countries is essential to our country’s ability to open up new markets abroad for American-made goods.
And thanks to America’s shale gas revolution, which has unleashed a natural gas explosion resulting in the lowering of domestic energy costs, particularly for manufacturing, America is now not only the most productive and most innovative producer of manufactured goods in the world, we do it more efficiently and less expensively than our global competitors.
Trade is good, tariffs are bad.
Tariffs are taxes. They’re artificial and arbitrary financial barriers to economic activity between consenting adults. And so whenever you lower the tax on the free exchange of global goods and services, more exchange occurs and economically beneficial things happen for all involved.
When Mr. Smith and Mr. Wong are busy trading their respective goods and services with each other, they aren’t likely to be at war with each other. So not only is trade good for our domestic and global economy, it is also good for global peace and our national security.
The Senate did the right thing by voting to give President Obama trade promotion authority. American companies, as well as American workers, will be economically better off for it.
— Joe Armendariz is the director of government affairs for Armendariz Partners.