Bruce Bartlett on tariffs and trade deficits in the Washington Times:
Unfortunately, mercantilism lives on at the U.S. Commerce Department, where deficits are viewed as nothing but pure evil, stealing American jobs and wealth. Hence, Commerce Secretary Don Evans’ increasingly shrill attacks on China for contributing heavily to the U.S. trade deficit. Implicitly, he assumes that if we could make China’s costs of production higher, that we would somehow benefit because production would shift back from China to here.
