On Fri, 14 Nov 2003 13:53:13 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


If you followed the course of that discussion, no one here was complaining
about trade with NZ until Geoff made some silly statement to the effect that
the US is the "most protectionist country in the world," or something like
that. In fact, our tariffs and quotas are among the lowest in the developed
world. That's why we're running a $460 billion deficit.
No, I would say the EU would be amongst the most protectionist in the
world. The US is somewhat hypocritical however, wanting free access
without returning the favour.
It wouldn't be so grating if it wasn't for the fact that NZ is running a
relatively large trade surplus at the same time he was complaining.
Well, the US has a large population (both physically and numerically
:-)with lotsa money and a "consumerism" culture . It is hardly
surprising they import lots of stuff. Expecting other, poorer
countries with smaller populations to buy an equal quantity is
unrealistic. More to the point, if you want to reduce the trade
deficit, get out and sell stuff. It is a world market, and you have to
be competitive,and unfortunately, in my experience, US companies are
largely domestic focused, and don't realize there is a world outside
the US borders. Many US sourced products are uncompetitive in the
world market anyway. A couple of things I have tried to source from
the US in the past include plastic resin (HDPE, PP and other commodity
plastics, and some engineering plastics), fan motors (3* the cost of
our Taiwanese supplier, 2* the Spanish and even more expensive than
the overpriced Germans) and impellers. Don't bleat if you can't
compete.
Finally, complaints about trade deficits are a bit thin, when it
doesn't include repatriated profits. Bell Ameritech owned the NZ
monopoly telecom company in the 1990s, which regularly made profits
~$NZ700m (approx $US350m) per annum out of 3,8million people, by the
expedient of not spending any money on it. ~$NZ400m was returned to
the US each year - this was larger than our trade deficit but doesn't
show in the figures
Geoff