The curious case of duty-free buttons

Detroit, the "Arsenal of Democracy," retooled its factories during World War II and switched from making cars to making tanks, trucks and aircraft for the war effort. Unfortunately, we were so successful that we quickly ran out of raw materials to keep up with the rapid clip on the assembly lines. So Congress took an unusual step, in 1942, of eliminating the import tariff on scrap metal, allowing Detroit to keep military equipment rolling off the line. That industrial spirit defined a generation of Americans. Embodied by Rosie the Riveter, with her rolled-up sleeve and her "Yes We Can" attitude, America after the war went on to become a manufacturing powerhouse, creating the middle class and ushering in decades of unprecedented economic growth. But over the years, something changed. Instead of saying "Yes We Can" we're just as likely to say "No We Can't." Now, not only is scrap metal duty-free, but so are metal buttons--specifically, buttons made out of base metals that are then attached to clothes. At some point, someone decided that Americans just couldn't make these buttons, and that our only option was to import them from somewhere else. So we lifted the import tariff so we didn't unfairly punish clothing makers who couldn't get their supply of metal buttons from a domestic supplier. That makes sense in some cases. For example, cashmere is another duty-free item, because we don't have the climate--or the goats--to produce cashmere in enough quantity to supply sweater makers in America. But it just doesn't make sense when it comes to other products that could easily be produced in America. Why can't we produce metal buttons in America? Why don't we even try? Every few years, Congress passes a miscellaneous tariff bill, or MTB. While this legislation gets almost no attention in the press, it is an enormous bill full of trade earmarks granting duty-free status to hundreds of items. When the first MTB was passed in 1982, only 18 items got duty-free status. Today, there are over 1,300 bills pending before Congress to eliminate or reduce tariffs on various products: cashmere, canned oysters, exterior emergency lights for airplanes, fireplace tool sets, electrical transformers, sandwich grills, certain industrial chemicals, and other products that, for whatever reason, aren't made in large quantities in the United States. Perhaps making buttons or fireplace pokers or sandwich grills in the United States would make those products slightly more expensive for American consumers. But as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently pointed out, to get out of this recession, our economy needs to be driven less by consumer demand and more by advancing our exports abroad. Extending duty-free status to products that could easily be made in America is exactly the wrong strategy for our economy. There are plenty of good reasons we should be trying to build some of these things in the United States. We have millions of unemployed manufacturing workers who are looking for work. We have unmatched innovation and ingenuity that can be harnessed to build products more cost effectively. And domestic manufacturers save money on freight, transport, brokerage and insurance. Instead of making excuses for why we can't build things in the United States, we should be creating incentives to help domestic manufacturers compete with their foreign counterparts. If American companies need raw materials that aren't available in commercial quantities, our policy should be to incentivize domestic production of those materials, rather than creating incentives to build those products overseas. Instead of eliminating duties on foreign products, we could be creating jobs for thousands of laid-off American workers. Finally, by eliminating duties on some of these products, we reward countries that repeatedly discriminate against our own exports. Over the years, we have reduced or eliminated tariffs on thousands of products, including those metal buttons, through multilateral or bilateral trade negotiations. But the trade earmarks in the MTB are unilateral: A Chinese company making electrical transformers can ship them to America duty-free, but an American company making transformers can't necessarily ship them to China duty-free. Granting duty-free status to thousands of new products does nothing to help American companies struggling to get a foothold in foreign markets. We know that American workers and businesses can compete with anyone in the world when there's a level playing field. Giving a free pass to thousands of imported products that could be made in America is the wrong way to level that field. Maybe America will never be a leading manufacturer of metal buttons, fireplace pokers, or electrical transformers, but we'll never know if we don't try. Stabenow is a member of the Senate Budget Committee, Finance Committee and energy and natural resources Committee.