President Bush had some less than kind words yesterday for presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  Noting their recent criticism of NAFTA, and of Clinton’s call for a NAFTA “timeout,” he said, “In the 21st century, a timeout from trade would be a timeout from growth, a timeout from jobs and a timeout from good results.”

  Clinton responded with a strong indictment of the Bush administration’s trade policies which have “allowed our trade deficit to skyrocket and stood idly by while countries like China unfairly manipulate their currency and dump products like steel on the U.S. market.”

ManufactureThis has been uniformly critical of the current candidates for their failure to address China’s predatory trade practices.  So when we see Senator Clinton actual use words like “China,” “manipulate currency,” and “dumped” in the same sentence, we can’t help but perk up our ears.

There may be some small measure of progress in this.  But the bigger point is that Clinton doesn’t say what she would do to stop China’s dumping, for example.  What she might consider is that the U.S. has a number of trade laws on the books.  Strong enforcement of them should be an immediate first step for anyone serious about strengthening U.S. manufacturing and addressing China’s cheating.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Holding China Accountable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.