Ed Gresser, Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the Progressive Policy Institute, put out his trade fact of the week, elaborating on PPI’s newest report Trump’s Folly, Harris’ Opportunity: Trade and the Blue-Collar Worker. The report “assesses the limitations of “Bidenomics”' honorable-but-not-quite-successful effort to create a “worker-centred” trade policy, and then suggests ways to connect trade policy to blue-collar aspirations and concerns, organized around a “guidepost” and four policy themes.” Two of those policy themes are purging junk tariffs and creating more export opportunities, as opposed to a national sales tax.
Theme 1: Bring home goods prices down by purging junk tariffs. Reduce the cost of living by purging the 11,414-line tariff system of lines — for groceries, for clothes and shoes, for small appliances, and table silverware – which raise prices, discriminate against women and lower-income families, and don’t protect any jobs. The launch for this is the Fletcher/Pettersen Pink Tariffs Study Act introduced by Reps. Lizzie Fletcher and Brittany Pettersen this spring.
Theme 2: Help workers find better jobs by creating more export opportunities. Data from the Census and BEA illustrate the high quality of jobs in exporting firms. As just one example, African American-owned exporting firms average 10 more employees and $10,000 more in payroll per worker than the U.S. business community generally. Here the next president can build on some creative Biden team policy launches — see Secretary Raimondo’s launch of the Global Diversity Exporter Initiative — and combine this with revived Obama-era themes of opening markets, pooling strengths, and building relationships with friends and allies.