Let Them Go Barefooted

Just about every American needs to buy socks every year, while a relatively tiny number of U.S. workers actually MAKE socks for a living. Yet the Bush administration may decide by this Friday whether to sock it to the many for the temporary benefit of one small and dwindling industry.

Under a provision of the Central American Free Trade Agreement approved by Congress in 2005, the Bush administration is weighing whether to impose special duties on socks imported from Honduras. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, the move would placate a particular lawmaker in Alabama with several sock factories in his district and a few other, mostly southern lawmakers whose votes may be necessary for upcoming trade deals the administration wants.

Has U.S. trade policy come to this? For the sake of a domestic sock industry that, by its own count, employs only 20,000 workers, the U.S. government would impose a temporary 13.5 percent tariff on the 8.3 percent of imported socks that come from the small neighboring democracy of Honduras—a country that entered into a free trade agreement with the United States only two years ago.

By design, the tariff would mean higher sock prices for the 300 million or so Americans who buy and wear socks. And the sock tax would fall disproportionately on lower-income families, who spend a higher share of their income on such staples as food and clothing.

The Bush administration should forget nose counting for future trade agreements if gathering votes means raising trade taxes on low-income Americans. If the administration wants to support free trade, it should resist any calls for higher tariffs.