PROTECTION RACKET

International trade is good for the U.S. economy. It creates jobs to produce the products America exports, provides workers for foreign companies that produce goods here and broadens the choice of goods and services available to us. The good news is that America's international trade is constantly increasing:

• U.S. exports grew 12 percent in 2007, and the U.S. Department of Commerce reports that since the first General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade, in 1948, U.S. total trade as a percentage of gross domestic products has risen to more than 29 percent in 2007 from less than 10 percent.
• According to a Heritage Foundation study, the United States is the world's largest exporter; U.S. exports amounted to $1.6 trillion in 2007 alone and those exports generated 25 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) growth.

And trade creates jobs;

• America's exports of goods sold abroad -- electrical machinery, chemicals, plastics, agricultural products, medical and scientific instrumentation, for example -- support six million American jobs; exports of services account for another five million jobs.
• And foreign-owned companies operating in the United States directly employ five million American workers, including 16,000 in Ohio by Honda, 5,400 in South Carolina by BMW, 6,000 by Nokia and 15,000 by Nestlé.

So free trade is helping, not hurting, the American economy. Limiting free trade would be a harmful and depressing national public policy...

[ we're a consumer based society for good reason: we're all - 100% - consumers, and open markets allow the greatest degree of competition which saves us all money. Things change, and when America becomes uncompetitive in a certain industry its constituents must retool to something else - painful, but absolutely necessary. This issue is always little more than special interests bribing our politicians to give them preferential treatment - at cost to the rest of us.]

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