Here’s a graph of imports of goods and services since 1960. The original graph produced by FRED illustrates imports as negative, presumably since they decrease GDP. I’ve rectified the graph to show them as positive so that imports can be compared visually more easily to the other factors I’ve highlighted. Here’s another one that shows imports of goods and services excluding oil, also rectified.
What kind of policies can decrease non-oil imports?
Being unschooled in economics beyond macro 101, the only thing I can think of is protective tariffs and that’s likely to produce backlash.
I imagine there are other policy options, but what are they?
Comparing this graph to yesterday’s (exports), and without having actually looked at numbers to back this up, it seems to me that imports are closer “predicted” sans recession than exports.
On the second graph, why are the numbers larger if we’re ‘excluding’ oil? Shouldn’t they automatically be smaller (closer to zero, since it’s confusing when talking about negative numbers), since we’re an oil importer, and you’re removing a component of imports?
What’s striking to me is that imports more than doubled during the aughts. Seems consistent with people buying a lot of stuff with money from the housing boom.
One can change tax policies, C Stanley. Currently we tax income and investment income at significant rates. Drop those in favor of a tax on consumption instead. Over time you should see more savings and less consumption, especially of stuff that people don’t really need.
Stanley – it’s hard, knowing nothing of what is being imported, to find ways to reduce imports (and countries that try to reduce imports usually end up looking like North Korea more than say, Sweden).
In the US, where a lot of imports are of manufactured goods from developing countries, you could enforce labor/environment protections (“level the playing field”), but this would, of course, result in higher-priced consumer goods and create dead weight losses. (Of course, supporters of that plan would say that it would support US manufacturing jobs.)