Today’s ad (link below), featuring a mock credit card issued by the People’s Republic of China, described “the other credit crisis” threatening America’s economic future – the crisis created by the country’s sky-high trade deficit with China and our massive borrowing to continue over-consumption of Chinese goods.  The 1,900-member Council warned that the resulting debts “are leaving future generations of Americans at the mercy of our Chinese creditors.”

Worse, the ad explained, the trade gap “does not exist because China is just better at making things than Americans.  The Chinese government goes out of its way to encourage exports and prevent imports” with a wide variety of trade barriers and other predatory economic policies.

The ad also highlighted President Obama’s failure to combat an especially important type of Chinese trade cheating – deliberately undervaluing its currency to gain trade advantages for Chinese goods in Chinese, U.S., and other global markets.  During his primary campaign last year, the president endorsed a strong Congressional bill to fight this exchange-rate protectionism, but last week his Treasury Department declined even to accuse China of currency manipulation.

Along with its other trade policy actions, this decision, the ad pointed out, also contrasts sharply with the administration’s pledge to “ensure strong enforcement of the rules” of trade.  

The Council’s first ad, run in the Washington Post and the Washington Times last month, called on President Obama to refocus his international trade policies on helping U.S.-based industry combat foreign protectionism.  It warned that without this policy overhaul, producing our way out of the current economic crisis through a renewed domestic manufacturing base will become impossible for America, and the nation will remain crippled by excessive debts.

Said Council President Kevin L. Kearns, “Production and jobs lost to foreign protectionism are damaging enough in normal times.  Nowadays they will help make the difference between an accelerating meltdown and a genuine chance for recovery.  Either President Obama becomes a major change agent and uses new trade policies and new domestic initiatives to rebuild America’s productive and wealth-creating capacities, or the economy could sink into a long-term depression.”

The Council’s ad campaign will continue later this week and month in both The Washington Post and The Washington Times.  Future ads will focus, among other subjects, on the misguided financial-sector emphasis of the Obama economic recovery strategy, the dangerous consequences of the continued misunderstanding by the Administration and Congress of the role of manufacturing in wealth creation, and the failure to use trade policy to bring China’s skyrocketing greenhouse gas emissions under control.

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