Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/1456275
4 UCW MARCH 2 - 8, 2022 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM STAFF PUBLISHER Bill Bowman Bill@upandcomingweekly.com OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Paulette Naylor accounting@upandcomingweekly.com EDITOR Emily Sussman editor@upandcomingweekly.com ASSISTANT EDITOR Hannah Lee assistanteditor@upandcomingweekly. com PRODUCTION MANAGER/ GRAPHIC DESIGNER Dylan Hooker art@upandcomingweekly.com STAFF WRITER Alyson Hansen MARKETING ASSOCIATE Linda McAlister Brown linda@upandcomingweekly.com DISTRIBUTION MANAGER/SALES ADMINISTRATOR Laurel Handforth laurel@upandcomingweekly.com CONTRIBUTING WRITERS John Hood, Margaret Dickson COVER Design by Dylan Hooker Up & Coming Weekly www.upandcomingweekly.com 208 Rowan St. P.O. Box 53461 Fayetteville, NC 28305 PHONE: 910-484-6200- FAX: 910-484-9218 Up & Coming Weekly is a "Quality of Life" publication with local features, news and information on what's happening in and around the Fayetteville/Cumberland County community. Up & Coming Weekly is published weekly on Wednesdays. Up & Coming Weekly welcomes manuscripts, photographs and artwork for publication consideration, but assumes no responsibility for them. We cannot accept responsibility for the return of unsolicited manuscripts or material. Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. The publisher reserves the right to edit or reject copy submitted for publication. Up & Coming Weekly is free of charge and distributed at indoor and outdoor locations throughout Fayetteville, Fort Bragg, Pope Army Airfield, Hope Mills and Spring Lake. Readers are limited to one copy per person. © 2020 by F&B Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction or use of editorial or advertisements without permission is strictly prohibited. Various ads with art graphics designed with elements from: vecteezy.com and freepik.com. PUBLISHER'S PEN 82 64 82 83 79 82 63 64 83 66 64 65 THU MAR 03 FRI MAR 04 SAT MAR 05 SUN MAR 06 MON MAR 07 TUE MAR 08 76 41 69 51 80 60 86 61 86 67 82 56 Partly Cloudy Partly Cloudy Sunny Cloudy Mostly Sunny Thunderstorms Association of Community Publishers Hundreds of thousands of North Carolin- ians work in companies that sell goods and services all around the world. ey'll pros- per, as will our state, to the extent we knock down barriers to our exports. Few disagree with that goal. Differences of opinion arise when we get specific. Con- sider the recent news that the United States ran a trade deficit of $859 billion last year. In dollar terms, that's the largest such deficit in the country's history. It's also a 27% in- crease over the trade deficit for 2020. At the risk of sparking the first big dis- agreement, I should say at the outset that I don't think the trade deficit is itself an issue of critical importance. It doesn't signify, for example, that our exporters took it on the chin. In fact, goods exports shot up 23% last year to $1.8 trillion, also a record amount, as economies around the world began to recover from the COVID crisis and their consumers gobbled up American-made products. Of course, American consumers also gob- bled up goods imported from abroad. And America's service industries didn't have as good a year, in part because of continued weakness in education and tourism (if for- eigners come to the U.S. to study or travel, their expenditures constitute exports). So, the net result was a trade deficit — but that hardly made it a crisis. American consumers got products they highly valued. And our service sector will likely bounce back more strongly in 2022 as COVID- induced fears and restrictions fade. More fundamentally, because America remains one of the best places to invest money, we are going to run trade deficits of some size for the foreseeable future. It's an inescap- able fact of accounting: If we run a capital- account surplus, we must run a current- account deficit, the vast majority of which will be a trade deficit. Now, let's talk about China. America's $355 billion trade deficit with that country represented 41% of the total. Again, exports to China rose but imports from China rose much more. Remember the deal former President Trump negotiated with the Chinese regime two years ago? It required the Chinese to purchase an additional $200 billion in American imports by the end of 2021. e deal didn't stick. Chinese imports from American firms turned out to be only 57% of the "required" figure. Moreover, since the 2020 agreement came after the former president initiated a trade war, set- ting off cycles of retaliatory tariffs, the real point of comparison would be exports to China now vs. exports to China before the tariff escalation. By that metric, the policy has been an abject failure. Our exports to China haven't yet returned to the pre-trade- war baseline. I'm not arguing that the Trump admin- istration bungled the execution of the agree- ment during its last year, or that the Biden administration bungled it during 2021. I'm rejecting the entire premise that the way to help American industries sell more overseas is to negotiate sales quotas with national governments. Exports to China went up last year but exports to our other trading part- ners, especially in Europe, went up more. e latter didn't happen because a bunch of politicians set sales quotas. We need to stop trying to manage trade and focus instead on slashing taxes (tariffs) and increasing our economy's productive capacity. With regard to the first goal, the best way to encourage the governments of our trading partners to lower tariffs and other barriers to accessing their markets is to offer reductions in our existing barriers to their goods and services — not to raise tariffs first and seek negotiation later. As recent experi- ence has shown, that tends to provoke retaliatory tariffs, not productive discussion leading to net reductions in trade barriers. And with regard to productive capacity, North Carolina leaders and their counter- parts in Washington have full power to act on their own. Reforming our systems of taxation, regu- lation, education and infrastructure would help all our businesses, including exporters, to grow and thrive. Managing trade will never work by JOHN HOOD Photo courtesy of Pexels. JOHN HOOD, Chairman of the John Locke Foundation. Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@upand- comingweekly.com. 910-484-6200