Category: Trade

The US housing market is extremely competitive right now; prices are high and houses are selling fast. When Molly Rodela — who is a wife as well as a mother to two kids — was finally able to find a suitable house for a reasonable price online, she could not spend any time considering the … Continue reading Here’s How Biden Is Making It Even Harder to Buy a Home

Here’s some good news for the avid drinkers in your life: Some kinds of whiskey are about to get a lot cheaper. On Thursday, the US government agreed to remove the steep tariffs it had placed on Scottish whiskey, Fox Business reports. The levies had raised the cost of this whiskey, Scotland’s main export, by … Continue reading Here’s Why Whiskey is About to Get a Lot Cheaper

The United States steel industry has long received government protection from import competition, today in the form of hundreds of “trade remedy” (antidumping and countervailing duty) measures on specific iron and steel products and “national security” tariffs on almost all forms of finished and semi‐​finished steel products. Numerous economic analyses have shown that these measures raise domestic steel prices … Continue reading How American Steel Protectionism Harms American Manufacturers in One Simple Chart

New Biden Section 232 actions could not only harm the economy but also undermine the administration’s own economic and national security objectives. The law should be repealed, not embraced...

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis announced a deal May 17 that many are calling a “cease-fire” on the multiyear dispute over U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The European Union was set to double retaliatory tariffs next month on several American products, including whiskey and wine, but agreed to forego … Continue reading Do Steel and Aluminum From Europe Still Threaten US National Security?

Despite lumber prices soaring to a record high of $1,670.50 per thousand board feet, and the housing market booming at a 17.2% price increase from April 2020, the U.S. Commerce Department, rather than helping, plans to impose further burdens on U.S. consumers through increased taxes on imported softwood lumber. On Friday, the Department of Commerce announced its proposal to … Continue reading Steeper Tariff on Canadian Softwood Lumber Isn’t Solution

A few weeks ago, I explained how U.S. duties on imports of softwood lumber from Canada could significantly affect the North American lumber market, even though the published duty rate for most imports was only 9 percent. On Friday, the Commerce Department gave us a perfect example of how this works in practice and why the U.S. trade remedies (antidumping and … Continue reading In the Midst of Skyrocketing Lumber Prices, the Commerce Department… Doubles Tariffs?

President Trump famously (and falsely) said that “trade wars are good and easy to win.” But we now have confirmation that, just as economic theory predicted, American taxpayers are the biggest losers from the former president’s tariffs. (Which have largely been continued by President Biden so far.) As reported by Reason’s Eric Boehm, a new … Continue reading We Just Got Proof that Americans, Not China, Are Paying for the Tariffs

Since 1948, the U.S. annually has celebrated World Trade Month and World Trade Week in May. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan described World Trade Week as “a truly appropriate time to remember the many benefits international trade has conferred on our country and to reflect on the many blessings the spread of economic freedom has brought, and can bring, … Continue reading 3 Ways to Improve Trade Freedom During World Trade Month