Foreign Trade

What do you have that I want?

Trade requires direct connections. If we have an excess of a product or the capability to expand our production, we want to sell it overseas. If the other country also has more capacity for other products we import, we could reach an agreement. It is a country by country task.

Governors work with businesses to identify what States import and want to export. They target countries who need what we want to export. They all know that consumers make the final decisions. They enter trade agreements based on the probability that the deal would work. They do this on a commodity by commodity basis. If France imports peanuts and they want to sell wine, each country approves its access to its consumers. Once this is approved, ground teams from the business go to the receiving country to set up the distribution. Foreign governments help to train these exporters to comply with their rules.

The EU is a bureaucracy and it’s hard to see what role they would play in setting up these deals in a non-clunky way. They have certainly screwed up the domestic policies of their member countries with idiotic, tyrannical UN-oriented laws.

We export beef to Hong Kong and would like to export beef to China. But China already has unfettered access to US markets. Trump will certainly start to level out our trade imbalance with China by demanding a “this for that” deal on a commodity by commodity basis.

On trade with Cuba, Trump will begin by demanding legitimate elections in exchange for Cuba’s access to US tourists and exports to the US.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader