Por: kekepana.com/blog
Congress went home for Christmas without renewing a vital piece of legislation for America’s economic development policies: the Generalized System of Preferences, or GSP. Here we are in May and they still haven’t taken any action. For those of you not in the import business, GSP offers low or zero customs duties to developing countries to assist in their economic advancement. It is a low-cost alternative to traditional foreign aid – and has none of the problems of ensuring that our aid dollars actually get spent the way we think they will. Economists prize efficiency, and GSP is an efficient way to spark economic development without the middlemen. But it is being held up because a single senator wants to protect a single company.
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| If you don't like GSP, why are you here? |
The usual objection to GSP is that goods from poor countries will compete with poor producers in somebody’s Congressional district. Or that competition from, say, Bhutan will hurt American union members. There is virtually no recognition that imports from such countries support many of our local retailers (you know, the guy who lives down the street) or that most of what comes in under GSP consists of inputs used by American manufacturers who employ American union members. We just don’t bother to think such things through. Ending GSP (or the moral equivalent: allowing to lapse, as Congress has done), is a politician’s way of telling the American public that Congress doesn’t want our citizens to have the freedom to choose what products they buy, and that Congress isn’t very serious about creating jobs unless it is in staid manufacturing industries that are on their way out anyway.
