Whitmer, Biden in Opposite Directions for Fuel-Starved United States

Gretchen Whitmer and Joe Biden

President Joe Biden may be preparing to make a big ask of the United States’ neighbor to the north, and if he does it will run contrary to the agenda of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and her administration.

According to Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, the first-term Democratic president is considering asking Canada to boost its oil exports to the United States. However, the president halted construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline on his first day of office. XL would’ve have transported 830,000 barrels of Canadian crude from Alberta to Nebraska each day.

In the meantime, the Michigan governor and Attorney General Dana Nessel – both Democrats like Biden – have been working in the courts to permanently shut down a five-mile portion of the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline which ships 540,000 barrels of Canadian hydrocarbons daily across a five-mile section of the Straits of Mackinac lakebed. 

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Georgia Rep. Austin Scott Leads Bipartisan Push to Lower India’s Tariffs on Pecans, a Major Georgia Export

U.S. Representative Austin Scott (R-GA-08) and 22 other members of the House want U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai to help reduce India’s tariffs on American pecans.

India currently has a 36 percent tariff on American pecans, far higher than the 10 percent tariff on other American tree nuts, like pistachios and almonds.

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Commentary: Export Bans and the Re-Emergence of the Nation-State

The COVID-19 pandemic has served to upend many long-held policy assumptions, but none so clearly as the theory that international trade rests purely on economic incentives, and that those economic incentives will always override a country’s more base instincts to act in its own interest because of the cost to global profits.

Responses from countries around the world to COVID-19 have significantly fractured this argument. It can no longer be said with unshakable confidence that nations will sidestep their own economic objectives, interests, and policies for the sake of a more profitable international economic integration.

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China, Tariffs, Trade, Cost and Prices: An Explainer

by Rick Manning   Stock markets go up and down based upon the latest trade rumors. Predictions of price hikes make headlines, yet the inflation rate remains at the levels, 2.0 percent at last count, desired by the Federal Reserve. What is going on?  And is this even really a trade war with China at all, or is it part of something much bigger?  These are questions that should be asked but are often lost to click-bait headlines.  So, here are a few thumbnail answers that will hopefully help you understand what is going on. Question: Are President Trump’s use of tariffs against China part of a trade war? Those who try to put tariffs on goods made in China into this context are deliberately narrowing the real challenge in the economic relations between the U.S. and China. The tariffs are designed to restructure America’s trade relations with China, but when you examine the key demands from the recent attempts to create a new economic partnership with China, they are mostly focused upon protecting patents, ending forced technology transfers to the Chinese government and stopping Chinese currency manipulation which always puts U.S. goods at a competitive disadvantage with Chinese goods. Traditional trade deals…

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Commentary: Contrary to Some Conservatives’ Slavish Devotion Free Trade Dogma, Trade Deficits Do Matter

by Spencer P. Morrison   Steve Hanke recently set out to prove “why President Trump’s trade message and protectionist policies are rubbish” in a Forbes article. Instead, the Johns Hopkins University economist exposed himself as a word-mincing, logic-twisting sophist – just like every other intellectual mercenary associated with the faux-libertarian propaganda mill that is the Cato Institute. Hanke’s argument: trade deficits don’t exist, China is not screwing America, and President Trump (the village idiot) is jousting windmills. The real problem is lazy Americans who shop-til-they-drop and demand welfare “gimmies” from Uncle Sam. Faust’s Bargain Hanke begins his argument by explaining that trade deficits don’t really exist. Instead, the goods trade deficit is simply one half of the equation: In economics, identities play an important role. These identities are obtained by equating two different breakdowns of a single aggregate. Identities are interesting, and usually important, by definition. In national income accounting, the following identity can be derived. It is the key to understanding the trade deficit. (Imports – Exports ) ≡ (Investment – Savings) + (Government Spending – Taxes) Given this identity, which must hold, the trade deficit is equal to the excess of private sector investment over savings, plus the excess of government spending over tax revenue.…

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