FOREIGN TRADE: Two Billion a Year

When he is asked to describe his Government career, 55-year-old Assistant ECAdministrator Wayne Chatfield Taylor gives a rueful one-word reply: “Bruises.” A New Deal stalwart for 17 years, ex-Investment Banker Taylor picked up many a bump as Assistant AAAdministrator, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Under Secretary of Commerce (he directed the famous wartime eviction of Sewell Avery from Montgomery Ward), and president of the Export-Import Bank.

Last week Wayne Taylor handed out a few bruises on his own account, in a 227-page report of a joint EGA-Department of Commerce mission. After spending ten weeks in Europe, studying methods of increasing European exports to the U.S., Taylor’s committee came to one hardheaded conclusion: the U.S. must increase its European imports by $2 billion a year or its own exports will wither away and European living conditions will :all to a dangerous level. Unless this is done, he said in effect, much of the good accomplished by EGA (expenditures more han $7 billion to date) will be thrown away.

In a few short, sharp paragraphs, the report dispelled any idea that the dollar shortage is something new; it started 35 years ago and has grown steadily worse ever since. Between 1914 and 1949, America’s exports exceeded her imports by $101 billion. This “socalled favorable balance of trade,” said the report, was largely paid for by $68 billion in Government loans & grants to Europe and more than $10 billion in private gifts. These grants “have in effect been unconscious subsidies to American export industries” at the expense of American taxpayers. The subsidies could be eliminated, or at least cut, only by drastic changes in U.S. and European ways of doing business. Among its other proposals:

¶ U.S. tariffs, which add about 15% to the price of dutiable goods, should be reduced.

¶The red tape should be cut from U.S. Customs regulations. One horrible example: An importer of women’s coats could not get his goods through Customs because U.S. officials were unable to decide whether the import duty should be levied on the cloth or on the coat buttons. EUR) European countries must relax or abolish all import-export controls as quickly as possible and stop penalizing exporters, as Britain has, by putting an extra tax on export profits.

¶The “Buy American” statutes of the Federal Government and 22 states, which keep out foreign products, should be revoked.

¶European sellers must develop a more aggressive attitude toward the American market.

Only by a free competition, unhampered by government controls or private cartels, does the commission think the job can be done. Said the report: “Competition is not a one-sided concept. Our insistence on the opportunity to compete with others carries with it an obligation to let others freely compete with us.”