
Daniel Griswold
SPECIAL REPORT—Americans currently pay high taxes on food, clothing, automobiles, industrial inputs and other goods and services, and their own United States Trade Representative is vigorously fighting other countries to keep it that way. Even worse, the government’s efforts all but ensure that removing such taxes — and easing the artificial burdens they place on American families and businesses — will remain unnecessarily, and irrationally, difficult for years to come.
I run a successful manufacturing and export business. My success depends on our ability to accurately cost the materials and services we consume. If my estimates are wrong, I won't stay in business very long. Our government has no such apparent obligation. Our tax dollars are being wasted on projects that are so out of sync with accepted norms that one wonders who is involved in these decisions.
The United States has been a tremendous magnet for attracting foreign direct investment. Roughly 17 percent of the world’s $22 trillion stock of FDI is deployed in the U.S. economy — triple that of the next largest destination. With the world’s biggest economy, a skilled workforce, an innovative culture, and deep and broad capital markets, the U.S. has enormous advantages to attract investment from the world’s best companies. But those advantages have been eroding.
A protracted political crisis that has threatened to derail the democratic transition initiated after the downfall of Tunisia’s entrenched autocratic regime in January 2011 appears to be headed toward a peaceful resolution. However, tensions between secular and religious political forces, stoked by the assassinations of two prominent secular politicians in the space of less than six months, are still running quite high.
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