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By the way, we’re having a trade war with Mexico.

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  March 20th, 2009 at 10:21 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Yes, yes, I know: NAFTA’s supposed to prevent that sort of thing, but we’re having one anyway:

Ricardo Alday, spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington said pressuring politicians by hitting imports from states with key Democratic leaders with tariffs of up to 90 percent “is one the main considerations,” for the action, the Dallas Morning News reported Wednesday.

The official list of products has not been released, but a draft obtained by economist Dermot Hayes at the University of Iowa suggest the tariffs will pinpoint almonds from California, sunglasses from Illinois, bowling equipment from Nevada and books from New York — the home states of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, President Barack Obama, Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

And before you ask: yes, it’s because of the bill that Dina Titus (D-NV) said that she read.

I’ll let Charles Krauthammer (H/T: Instapundit) explain this one, because he came to the point pretty clearly:

That bill, we now discover, contains, among other depth charges, a Teamster-supported provision inserted by Sen. Byron Dorgan that terminates a Bush-era demonstration project to allow some Mexican trucks onto American highways, as required under NAFTA.

If you thought the AIG hysteria was a display of populist cynicism directed at a relative triviality, consider this: There are more than 6.5 million trucks in the United States. The program Congress terminated allowed 97 Mexican trucks to roam among them. Ninety-seven! Shutting them out not only undermines NAFTA. It caused Mexico to retaliate with tariffs on 90 goods affecting $2.4 billion in U.S. trade coming out of 40 states.

The problem here is twofold. First off, the American political party currently running the government acted incredibly irresponsibly in hyping up a misnamed “stimulus” bill that is instead turning out to be just one delayed time bomb of special-interest idiocy after another. There’s a thousand pages of this stuff, just waiting to go off… and not even the Democrats themselves know which will be the next scandal. This isn’t even good internal politics: every Democrat who voted “yes” for this monstrosity is going to have spend the next two years explaining why he or she voted for [Stupid Thing N] – and why that shouldn’t be considered evidence that he or she should be spending more time with his or her family. It’s so bad that I’m almost sympathetic to their plight; then again, nobody forced them to elect Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House.

The second problem is that our current President (being a Democrat) wants to be a domestic-affairs President. That’s not a criticism. What is a criticism is that he apparently hasn’t internalized the thought yet that very little, if anything, that the President of the United States does domestically doesn’t have a foreign-affairs element to it. I sincerely doubt that the President intended to start a trade war with Mexico; he just decided that the risk of having one was less than the risk of getting between a lot of powerful Democrat-allied special interest groups and a ridiculous amount of money. We’re now seeing why this was a bad decision; one hopes that President Obama learns the right lessons from it.

In the meantime: my sympathies to Californian almond growers, Illinoisan sunglass-factory workers, Nevadan bowling ball manufacturers, and New Yorker book-binders. And everybody else who’s just gotten slapped with a tariff in the middle of our economic meltdown.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

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COMMENTS

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  • texas214

    There’s got to be joke in here somewhere given the President’s remarks on the Special Olympics and the less than thought out (being generous and not wanting to offend) policies he is taking.

  • grillinvillain

    how many bowling balls and sunglasses Mexicans import from the US?

  • djemi

    nt

  • Crowe

    Obama has managed to take what was supposedly the worst international situation for the US in memory and make it ten-times worse… and all in less than two months of his presidency.

    At this rate, we’ll be at war with Canada and Mexico and wheeling wheelbarrows of cash for a loaf bread by year’s end!

    I didn’t think it possible for the GOP to take back a majority in either house of Congress in 2010, but this rate of suckitude out of the WH and Dem-led Congress may make that a distinct possibility.

  • larryp

    any of these gaffes or errors. If it gins up the chaos, that is what he wants. Iran ready to send Sahhab long range missles to US embassies in other coutries or U.S. bases-, well…US had the clenched fist. Insulting gifts to UK PM…he is not so great. and on and on. I really think he wants to call for martial law.

  • http://franklinslocke.blogspot.com/ franklinslocke

    Mexico cannot afford a trade war with us. They are near chaos and could collapse. This trade war cannot help. If this causes their collapse like Canada collapsed durnting the Great Depression, it would be devastating for both Mexico and the US.

    You think we have an immigration problem now. You think the border is violent now. Wait until the Mexico?s government collapses.

    http://franklinslocke.blogspot.com/

  • The_Gadfly

    The Mexican government is targeting the districts of the power players who organized and passed the bill. That means the people from their districts are the idiots who put the bigger idiots in office, usually be lopsided margins. They’re getting their comeuppance.

  • The_Gadfly

    I dunno. I’d like to think that, and the House did a good job of standing firm against the bailout, but now they’ve turned around and half of them voted for the ex post facto tax. Yeah, I know they’ve only “targeted” the firms they “bailed out,” except I also know they forced some of those banks to take the “bailout” money so the banks that required the “bailout” money wouldn’t look incompetent and wind up with people starting a run on them anyway. Net effect: Congress is now setting the pay and bonus rates for all the major banks regardless of whether they needed or wanted the bailout money.

  • http://hillbillypolitics.com Steph C

    They nationalized the banks without “nationalizing” the banks and every other business they could get their hands on, either by bailouts or unions. (I’d use tags for emphasis but for some reason they don’t seem to work so well in the comment section.)

  • jackbenimble

    California, New York, Nevada and Illinois are all states with heavy concentrations of Mexican illegal aliens. Mexico may end up doing as much damage to Mexican citizens as to anybody. Who picks almonds? I bet that is a job that Americans won’t do.

    Further, the Democratic leaders that Mexico is targeting in California, Illinois, New York, and Nevada are the very same ones that Mexico needs to rely on to push through their much desired Comprehensive Immigration Reform aka Shamnesty. Since I am against shamnesty, I hope that Mexico manages to get these Democrats good and pissed off.

  • dkons21

    However, I am going to play Devil’s Advocate anyway. It does not matter how much of anything they import, so long as it is something, and is providing a job to an american citizen.

    It astonishes me that the democrats, who like to call themselves the party of the people, generalize everyone into a damned statistic, and forget about the fact that they are human beings.

    Sure, people will say it is just another job lost, maybe 2, 3, 4, who cares if it was up to 100 people who’s jobs would be affected. That is only a pimple on a natt’s behind compared to the issues we’re currently dealing with. But those workers are more people that will lose their lifestyle, and if they have families those families will suffer too. As taxpayers we’re forced to suffer more as taxes will eventually have to be raised to replenish the unemployment funds required by those workers put out of business.

    I don’t care if you manufacture paper clips, clean my toilets, serve my food, build cars, or skyscrapers. If you lose your job because of the idiot policies of our incompetant politicians, I feel for you, and personally know what it’s like.

    It is all I can do to sit here day in and day out and see, hear, and think about how our friends, families, and country are being ruthlessly beaten by the incohearance of ‘the one’ and his party. Don’t get me wrong though, there are a few good democrats, and several RINO’s who no sooner belong in our government than I belong in a space-shuttle.

    Someday, hopefully sooner than later, the majority of this country will wake up, and realize where there problems come from, and how to deal with them, and vote in some fiscally and socially intelligent people to run this country the way it should be run. I can’t wait to get out of college and move home to Nevada to be there for an election cycle. You will never find someone more motivated to get Titus and Reid unseated than me. I only hope I can offer my assistance before it is too late to reverse the scars they are trying to leave.

    Ok, I’m done ranting.

    P.S. Where are a few good conservative lawyers to bring some criminal cases for treason against these people. That’s still punishable by Capital Punishment, right?

  • mbecker908

    They tend to not be employed by firms manufacturing stuff we export.

  • jackbenimble

    It doesn’t matter where the illegals work. If you screw up the bowling ball industry in Nevada or the sunglass industry in Illinois, the next thing you know, middleclass Americans who used to be paying an illegal alien to mow the lawn are unemployed and are now mowing their own laws rather than paying an illegal.

  • http://www.realityunwound.com realityunwound

    I’m still waiting to see who’s going to take the in the GOP. DeMint? Sanford? Steele? Unless it’s someone, we’ll be right where we are again.

    Idiocy like this isn’t enough to turn the status quo, imho. Repubs need someone who captures imaginations again, not just someone who’s smart or has good ideas.

    An entertainment culture, unfortunately, is looking for entertainers. That’s why Prince Barry is POTUS.

  • Crowe

    Idea Machine. Entertaining and takes on all comers. Ready for the questions about his baggage.

    Would slice and dice ‘em all, and run rings around them on coming up with and welcoming new, good ideas.

  • redneck_hippie

    on the “open thread.” I’ve been thinking (especially since the recent flap over Steele’s faux pas) that we need a *Newt*like leader to consolidate our resurgence out of the wilderness. Check out hotair headlines for the article cause I already linked it elsewhere. Newt is going to forge a SoCon FiCon alliance.

  • Common_Cents

    When he proudly blurted Obama will be challenged in the first 6 months.

    With an Obama total (much self inflicted) disaster on his hands domestically and his bungling of international affairs(gee, don’t they love us now?), combined with an attempt to release enemy combatants on the streets of the US we are in big big trouble.

    You think the economy is bad now? How soon we forget that a 9/11 attack stopped the entire economy in its tracks in 10 minutes. Now we are in much more of a vulnerable and weaker position to recover from such attack.

    Aside from an attack on US soil, why wouldn’t any nation hold back from any aggressive plans they might have? Obama has shown his hand and will fold like a cheap suit.

    Who’s gonna make the first move? N. Korea? Iran? China? Russia?

  • itrytobenice

    Russia/Poland/Iran (when BO offered to sacrifice Poland et al if Russia would quit prepping Iran to set the world on fire – whereupon Russia kicked sand in his face and took his lunch money.)

    And I use SNAFU in its original sense: Situation Normal: All Messed Up. Or something like that.

  • Crowe

    …not to mention the “Reb Button” translation fiasco which, while not directly BHO’s fault, happened on his watch and was perpetrated by his Dept. of State and his Sec State. Two months in and he’s making Bush’s abuse of the English language along with Clinton’s immoralities seem like quaint memories of kinder, easier, more sane days.

    I never, never thought someone would make me *miss* President Clinton. BHO has done it.

  • itrytobenice

    I also forgot the “Button” issue.

    Of course what made me so mad about that was that the only reason he/she did it was to get in a dig at President Bush. Like he was so incompetent they were going to have to ask for do-overs from the Ruskies. And given one of those wonderful universal truths, the great wheel turned around fast enough to grind them immediately.

    We’re going to have to start taking notes. There’s no way we’re going to be able to remember all the SNAFUs of this moron.