If a trade war is raging, no one has told company salesmen

While Americans often worry about the lack of U.S.-made products in stores, they should take heart. An increase in imports shows that foreign-made products are getting better, and more exports show that American-made products are taking hold across the world.

Trade policy starts at home. Products carry labels that tell consumers where they come from, so consumers can avoid foreign-made goods if they want. But it seems that an item’s price and quality matter more to Americans than where it comes from. The proof is in the pudding: Import numbers keep increasing.

{mosads}Maybe there simply aren’t enough options to buy American these days. If that is the case, then it’s because of the underappreciated workhorses of trade policy: salesmen. Our shops are stocked with goods from around the world because salesmen convinced retailers that those goods will sell.

The American company salesman has been just as productive selling U.S. goods abroad. More and more people across the world purchase American-made products. While consumers may fear that America cannot compete on the world stage when they see so many foreign-made goods around, perhaps people in other countries feel the same. Their markets contain progressively more American-made goods.

Over the past 10 years, U.S. exports increased by 14 percent above inflation, increasing from $2.0 trillion to $2.4 trillion. U.S. imports increased 4 percent above inflation, increasing from $2.8 trillion to $2.9 trillion. The Great Recession took a toll on both imports and exports but each has fully recovered, and then some.

Services account for more than half (56 percent) of the growth in exports while goods account for 89 percent of the growth in imports.

Of the increased importation of goods, Mexico and China accounted for 60 percent. Exports to Canada decreased over the time when adjusted for inflation.

Trade has only increased so far through the Trump administration. During the first four months of 2018, exports increased 14.4 percent over the first four months of 2017, rising from $725.8 billion worth of goods to $830.5 billion. Over the same period, imports increased 16.5 percent, from $886.2 billion to $1,032.3 billion.

If that trend in exports continues through 2018, the U.S. will add more to its exports than the entire annual production of Pakistan. And the U.S. imported more than the entire annual production of Austria, according to the World Bank.

Our links to the economies of other countries are deeper than just the increases in imports and exports. Your typical American-based auto assembly line, for example, gets parts from all over the world. Sometimes the parts themselves are made by a foreign-owned company that manufactures them close to the plant. According to the federal government, the vehicle with the greatest number of American parts is the Kia Optima, a Korean nameplate. (Unfortunately, this measure also includes Canadian components, so it’s not perfect measure, but the vehicle is assembled in Georgia.) The distinctions between things that are foreign and things that are American get cloudier every day.

National political leaders may not be as powerful as they think in driving economic trends. Now, it is possible that escalating rhetoric will generate new trade restrictions that reverse the trends, but trade across borders continues to increase even as global leaders make headlines about new tariffs. Perhaps leaders may find more pushback from the people that benefit from trade than they expect.

Policymakers and diplomats negotiate trade pacts, but it is resourceful salesmen that actually seal the deals that ship products across borders. They don’t take their marching orders from heads of state, they take them from the heads of their companies. The genie’s gotten so large that it will take a lot to put him back in the bottle.

James Hohman is a fiscal policy analyst at the nonprofit Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Midland, Michigan-based group aimed at promoting limited government.