Greg Mankiw's Blog: Summers on the New Congress
リンク: Greg Mankiw's Blog: Summers on the New Congress.
Larry Summers looks at the changed political landscape and concludes:
Sadly, he's probably right.Big structural tax reform or action on entitlements are almost inconceivable. The challenge for trade policy in the next two years will be primarily defensive: to resist protection rather than to further liberalization.
1 Comments:
That judgment is probably correct, which is why we need a Democrat in the White House to push through for freer trade. For the same reason that only a Republican like Nixon could seek deals with China (because had a Democrat tried the Republican opposition would have red-baited him) we need a Democrat President to push for free trade as Clinton-Gore did.
Bush never really pushed for any significant free-trade deals, but had he tried to with a Democrat-led Congress he would find it hard, because those legislators don't want to be seen as going along with a President that they cannot trust, whereas a Democrat President can pull them along.
Judging by the enthusiasm with which Greg Mankiw has been beating on this meme that the Democrats will be bad for free trade, I suspect he understands this and his party will now, all of a sudden after six years of tariff-raising and inaction on trade deals, suddenly start pushing for free-trade, mainly to score points against the Democrats.
In a sense yes, those Democrat legislators are to blame, but that doesn't excuse the Bush administration for squandering their opportunity on Doha.
Had we had President Gore rather than President Bush, it's quite certain that we would have more free-trade progress by this point.