Keep on Truckin'

For the last several years Mexican truckers have been frustrated by American truckers. Mexican long haul truckers are pretty high tech. When you see them on the roads in Mexico they are equipped with safety and computer equipment that you would never see on American trucks. But the unions in the US have been able to stop NAFTA from being implemented. The Bush Administration equivocated. The Obama administration, after a furious effort by US truckers, allowed a pilot program allowing Mexican truckers over the border to lapse.

Now the Mexicans have said "basta ya!" They imposed some new tariffs on American made products - those tariffs may cost American producers something north of $2.4 billion. The Mexicans had had enough. Free trade, as adopted by NAFTA, should go both ways, but evidently American political interests want to protect unions from alleged competition. Now more than 90 types of US products will be facing tariffs when they are exported to Mexico. Mexico is our third largest trading partner. So all of us will be paying for the narrow interests of a few truckers who don't want to compete.

One would hope that the idiots in Congress will at last admit the real benefits that NAFTA has offered America. But that may be asking for way too much. The xenophobic union thugs don't want to admit that Mexican truckers are well qualified.