[kerkeslager]

Wow, what an enlightening link.

At first, reading that there's an exemption process, I thought that the bill was better-thought-out than I initially had thought. But then seeing the existing exemptions, I'm realizing that this stinks of lobbying. It's clear that these exemptions are targeted at specific products, and are almost certainly there because some company lobbied to bypass going through the normal exemption process.

[rayiner]

That’s not the bill. That’s from the federal register, which records decisions of administrative agencies. Assuming you’re talking about Annex A, that is a recording of specific products that the USTR has ruled are excluded in response to existing exclusion requests:

> As set out in Annex A, the exclusions are reflected in 38 specially prepared product descriptions, which cover 46 separate exclusion requests.

As is clear from Section C, these are decisions on publicly filed exclusion requests that were the subject of public notice and comment. There is in fact a whole website dedicated to explaining what these exclusion requests are and how to apply for them: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/enforcement/section-301-investi...

As discussed above, criteria for exclusion are things like products that are only available from China, whether the product is strategically important to China, etc. But the decisions are made case-by-case and that’s why the list of excluded products is literally a list of specific products.

This is just a funny misunderstanding, but a lot of “the government is so corrupt” type ranting is rooted in these sorts of erroneous readings of legal documents.

[kerkeslager]

Thanks for the correction! It seems I didn't understand what I was reading.

[malshe]

> This is just a funny misunderstanding, but a lot of “the government is so corrupt” type ranting is rooted in these sorts of erroneous readings of legal documents.

Great point! I have seen my views change on many things once I started to read up/listen to experts who know the law.

[pergadad]

But the list of criteria itself looks like a lobbying piece. It's not, say, medical products. It's among others products that are part of China's own industrial strategy.

If you are punishing China, why would you leave out the sectors China considers as most important and on which it aims for strategic dominance?

[jfengel]

Presumably, it's because the regulators concluded that these were areas where we'd be cutting off our noses to spite our faces. It's widely thought that that applies to the entire bill, but even aside from that, this is basically what lobbyists are for.

They are representatives from the various American industries, hired to make their case in front of the regulators. The regulators are full-time bureaucrats, who know a lot about the domain at hand but also need to know what particular American companies want. There's no one answer to it; what the bureaucrats do for a living is make judgments about what's needed and what's not.

A big company that hires the best lobbyists (the ones with the most experience and the most contacts) definitely has a leg up, but the regulators aren't solely at their beck and call. (Usually. It's not that regulatory capture doesn't exist, but the vast majority of day-to-day dull grind of government really is just ordinary people trying to make good policy.) Often, small companies band together to hire a decent lobbyist; DC is chock full of organizations with names like "Vegan Caterers of America" and "Society of Diesel Mechanics" that don't have tons of money but they do show up at regulators to make their cases on matters nobody cares about except them.

I'm not really here to defend the system or make the case for it one way or another. It's just that DC works very differently from the way it's portrayed on TV (including the news), in ways that are simultaneously more interesting and excruciatingly boring. I don't have any specific info on this case, but it does sound like exactly the kind of hodgepodge that results from making a lot of little decisions rather than one big sweeping gesture.

[sulam]

Yes, but aren't you glad to know our government is looking out for the live bait and tackle vending machine industry?