FREE TRADE….How can George Bush keep a straight face while condemning unnamed “politicians in Washington” who don’t understand the glories of free trade?
“They don’t explain how closing off markets … would help the millions of Americans who produce goods for exports or work for foreign companies right here in the United States.”
Well, I’ll name one of those unnamed politicians: George W. Bush. Is he pretending already to have forgotten about the $173 billion farm subsidy bill and the nakedly political steel tariffs that he so eagerly endorsed in 2002?
Listening to George Bush is like the sound of a pair of slippers on a wooden floor. Flip flop, flip flop.
UPDATE: Plus there were the Chinese bra quotas. How could I have forgotten about those?
As conservative economist Bruce Bartlett says about Bush, “From the point of view of trade, it is the worst administration since Herbert Hoover helped bring on the Great Depression by signing the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930.”
