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**MAY 10, 2023**

Kuttner on TAP

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**** Vox and the Undertow of Corporate Democrats

Dylan Matthews's screed attacking Biden's industrial policies got an
assist from former Treasury official Kimberly Clausing.

Biden's industrial and climate policies are crudely protectionist;
they have "provoked mass outrage from foreign governments." Biden joins
Donald Trump in "undermining the open trade regime that their
predecessors from both parties worked for decades to build."

So says Dylan Matthews of Vox
<[link removed]>.
To help make the case, Matthews relies on Kimberly Clausing, a former
Treasury official, now out of government and teaching at UCLA Law
School.

The conversation promotes and echoes a 2019 book by Clausing, Open: The
Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital
<[link removed]>, which was
also blurbed by Larry Summers. At Treasury, where she was a senior
economist, Clausing did good work on global tax evasion, but was known
as a traditionalist on trade.

The Matthews-Clausing dialogue hauls out discredited clichés about the
efficiency of "free trade," as well as misrepresenting the continuity
between Biden's policies and Trump's.

Trump levied 25 percent across-the-board tariffs on most Chinese
exports, on the ground that the entire Chinese economic system was
riddled with subsidies, dumping, and cheap state-directed capital.

This sensible policy, created by Trump's one good appointee, U.S.
trade rep Robert Lighthizer
<[link removed]>, was bundled
with Trump's own ugly nativism. Biden has kept the tariffs but pursued
a much more nuanced set of other policies stripped of the China-bashing.

Both Matthews and Clausing gloss over the fact that China's economic
system is anything but free-market, and thus makes a mockery of the
supposed free-trade regime that they fault Biden for not defending.
Instead, they both blame the U.S. for adding to bilateral tensions.
Clausing calls on the U.S. to join the thoroughly discredited
Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was blocked by Congress as a series of
sweetheart corporate deals masquerading as China policy.

The dialogue also uses one straw man after another. "I wonder if the Buy
America stuff will even work on its own terms," says Matthews. "Maybe we
do bring manufacturing back, but we don't bring jobs because it's a
highly automated industry now."

Clausing heartily agrees. "It's kind of a fool's errand to think
that you're going to get a lot of manufacturing jobs out of all this
CHIPS money and all this steel protection."

But the point of CHIPS was never to generate massive numbers of jobs but
to get the U.S. back in the game in cutting-edge technology. And in
fact, when all the infrastructure, construction, and production jobs are
added up, the job gains will likely be in the millions.

Last month, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan delivered a
masterful speech
<[link removed]>
disavowing the neoliberal "set of ideas that championed tax cutting and
deregulation, privatization over public action, and trade liberalization
as an end in itself."

But the neoliberal zombies live on, fighting a rearguard action to
resurrect the strategy of corporate globalism-that so clearly
abandoned America's working families, enriched billionaires, and paved
the way for Trump.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

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Twelve Years of Being the Most Responsible Guy in the Room
<[link removed]>
On today's X-Date, the seeds for what is now a negotiation over how
much of the budget to cut were sown during Obama's 'grand bargain'
phase. BY DAVID DAYEN

Peer Into the Dark Money Abyss
<[link removed]>
While much of the funding to the 'dark money' behemoths tied to the
leaders of Congress remains a mystery, a review of corporate disclosures
reveals more of the companies that have donated. BY DONALD SHAW

The Tech Lobbying Is Coming From Inside the House
<[link removed]>
Emails from the U.S. trade representative's office show a cozy
relationship with Amazon, Google, and Facebook. BY DAVID DAYEN

 

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