House Democrats’ Report Hits Reagan Trade Policy

A Democratic congressional study concluded today that President Reagan clings to an old-fashioned trade policy that is devastating to agricultural and manufacturing industries.

“It is time to stop living in the past, and it is time to stop borrowing from our future industrial capacity to finance imports and inflated military budgets we cannot afford,” said the staff report published by the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

The 96-page analysis of U.S. trade practices, entitled “Industrial Import Shock: Policy Challenge of the 1980s,” was written by Milton D. Lower, a subcommittee economist.

Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), the panel’s chairman, said the report gives cause for “grave concern for the future economic well-being” of the United States.

He said the report links the decline in U.S. industrial competitiveness to policy choices of the Reagan Administration, “as reflected in mounting structural budget deficits, high real interest rates and the still overvalued dollar.”

‘Cumulative Damage’

Dingell said that “between this Administration’s misguided fiscal policies and its benign neglect of unfair foreign-trade practices, American goods-producing industries in the 1980s have suffered cumulative damage without historical parallel.”

He said the “negative swing of more than $100 billion in our industrial trade balance since 1980 dwarfs the effect of all the oil import shocks of the 1970s put together.”

The report said the Administration’s policies of the last four years come down to borrowing from the future to live in the past.

“The Administration wanted to get the government off our backs,” Dingell said, “so it cut taxes for the rich and financed a military buildup with budget deficits, leading to big increases in the real burden of national debt for the first time in the postwar era.”