On the Byrd Amendment:

New York Times

April 9, 2005

How to Hurt American Business

… "The Byrd amendment also added insult to injury when it gave the tariffs extracted from foreign companies to their American competitors. It's not hard to guess what happened next. American steel companies filed antidumping suits and collected $1.04 billion in four years. The rest of the world filed suits at the World Trade Organization and, naturally, won. The W.T.O. authorized the winners to hit the United States with punitive tariffs unless Congress repeals the Byrd amendment. This is a textbook case of global trade rules doing exactly what they're supposed to do. Now it would be nice to see members of Congress, including the many free-trade senators who cravenly voted for the Byrd amendment, come to their senses and repeal it."

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Washington Times

April 7, 2005

U.S. must repeal Byrd Amendment

Despite the White House's prodding, Congress has yet to bring itself to repeal the Byrd Amendment, a law which the World Trade Organization found in 2002 runs afoul of international trade rules. On Thursday, the EU Commission and Canada said they will be levying retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods in response to the Byrd Amendment. U.S. companies that have not benefited from the law's largesse will pay the price for Congress' inaction… The problem with the law is that U.S. companies began receiving double compensation for dumping. The tariff on dumped goods was intended to neutralize the potential injury caused by the imports, but since U.S. companies were receiving millions of dollars on top of that remedy, they were in effect given a government subsidy.

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Wall Street Journal

April 6, 2005

The Byrd Boomerang

… But with the Byrd Amendment, anti-dumping suits have become a kind of self-perpetuating payola…Now when U.S. businesses win anti-dumping complaints, they benefit both from the higher prices they can charge for their goods and from the tariffs paid by foreign competitors. Of course, those foreign companies merely pass along the cost of those tariffs in higher prices for their U.S. customers… President Bush wants Congress to repeal the Byrd Amendment, but so far the Members have been hearing mainly from the corporate-welfare constituency that wants to sustain it. Let's hope they start hearing from the export companies and workers who will now lose their jobs because of Mr. Byrd's boomerang.

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Chicago Tribune

March 4, 2005

Here piggy, piggy

The Byrd amendment creates a powerful financial incentive to bring dumping cases. It also unfairly protects American companies: The World Trade Organization ruled in 2002 the Byrd amendment was illegal. Last August, the WTO gave the green light for the European Union and seven other U.S. trading partners to collect punitive sanctions from the U.S as long as Byrd remains law. Outrageously, Congress has made no move to revoke the amendment… Each time the U.S. invokes the Byrd amendment, it thumbs its nose at the WTO and the notion of free trade. That chips away at America's credibility on trade and raises the prospects, of course, that other countries will flout WTO rulings. Foreigners aren't to blame. This outrage has been made in America.

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Journal of Commerce

April 1, 2005

CITAC: Repeal Byrd now

"The more than $40 million dollar retaliation announced today is yet another reason that now is the time to repeal the Byrd Amendment," said Steve Alexander, CITAC executive director and president of lobbying firm The CMR Group. "The most important reason why the Byrd Amendment needs to be repealed is because it is hurting the U.S. economy and U.S. consumers. It encourages the abusive filing and perpetuation of trade cases. With other trading partners likely to soon join Canada and the EU in retaliating against U.S. exports, Congress should move swiftly to repeal the law."

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Bloomberg

April 1, 2005

Tariffs slapped on US goods

In his budget proposal to Congress on Feb. 7, Bush called for repeal of the Byrd amendment, formally titled the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act, and said changing the law could save the U.S. Treasury $1.6 billion in the next fiscal year…Total payouts will rise as high as $1.6 billion this fiscal year unless the law is repealed, the EU says. The U.S. Congressional Budget Office last March estimated annual payouts will reach $1.15 billion by 2006 as distributions from tariffs on lumber begin… The Geneva-based WTO gave the EU, Canada, Brazil, Japan, India, South Korea and Mexico the right to retaliate against the U.S. law Nov. 27… In their complaints, the governments said the Byrd law enables the United States to punish exporters twice: first by imposing a duty and then by giving the money collected to the exporter's rivals. After the United States missed an end-2003 deadline for compliance, the WTO authorized governments to impose retaliatory duties on U.S. goods equal to 72 percent of the total paid by their companies.

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Forbes

March 23, 2005

Bye, bye Byrdie?

Opposition to Byrd is growing louder. The Bush Administration has called for repeal. And companies that import goods subject to these duties have banded together to fight for repeal. Byrd "undercuts the whole U.S. position on trade," says Steve Alexander, executive director of the Consuming Industries Trade Action Coalition, which counts Toyota Motor (nyse: TM — news — people), Target (nyse: TGT — news — people) and Procter & Gamble (nyse: PG — news — people) as members. CITAC launched a repeal effort earlier this month under the banner of the Byrd Amendment Working Group.

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