-By Warner Todd Huston
What is it we hear echoing in the left-o-sphere? Don’t we hear all the time that the left is chock-full-o-nuts on how those eeeevil capitalists are so in love with what they call “corporate welfare”? Aren’t the nutrooters always railing about how the right is so in bed with business, giving them oh so many tax breaks? Of course, the left loves their corporate welfare, too. So much so that they’ve gone back to slipping it into play even when it was defeated not only by the right, but deplored and castigated by the left’s pals in Europe and the international community.
I am talking, of course, about the infamous (and infamy is the proper word) Byrd Amendment. This little bit of poison was repealed by Congress in 2005, but the decrepit Byrd and his shifty friends snuck it back into law by camouflaging it in a recent spending bill. So now it’s back as law even though many countries in the world are upset about it, even though it harmed our trading reputation the last time this dose of hemlock was forced on our trading partners world wide, even though all it really ends up being is corporate welfare.
So, what is it? It’s a nasty piece of protectionist policy — the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act — that makes it quite lucrative for American businesses to claim that they are put at an unfair advantage by foreign products. How it works is a U.S. company will file paperwork with the federal government claiming that they are being harmed by unfair business practices from a foreign product. The government then slaps a high, punitive tariff on that foreign product and pays the American business the amount of the increased tariff. That’s it. The business doesn’t have to prove anything. There is no inspection agency, accounting agency or compliance agency to check the claims. They just get paid.
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