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Show Rep. Boggs Urges Reform of Tariff Jungle Depending on its material and how it is sewn, a handkerchief being imported into this country may be assessed at any of 100 different tariff rates, writes Rep. Hale Hoggs of Louisiana, chairman of the House-Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Economic Policy, in the late Header's Digest. In an article, "How Not to Lower Tariff Harriers," he urges reform of the current tariff "jungle" of rates on 5000 different items if the United States is to hold its own in negotiations with Common Market countries aimed at lowering tariffs. "The job will be impossible if our basic approach is grain by grain, brick by brick, item by item." A chocolate bunny with a sugar ribbon around its neck is labeled "con feet ionery" and takes a 20 per cent rate; without the ribbon, it is "sweetened chocolate," at ten per cent. An electronic tube can take rates of 8, 12, 15 or 17 per cent depending on whether it is to be used in an X-ray machine, radio transmitter, radar set or tele-continued tele-continued on Page Four) Rep. Boggs Urges Reform of Tariff 'Jungle' (Continued from Page One) phone relay. Artificial flowers made of feathers take a 30 per cent rate, but if an inspector decides they look more like fruit than flowers, the rate is 45 per cent. This situatoin grew out of our "most favored nation" trade agreements providing that a country with which we have such an agreement can send its wares into the U.S. at the lowest tariff rate we charge anyone for that product. If we want to admit artificial flowers from Brazil and not Japan we must specify they be made of feathers, as the Brazilian flowers are. The J apanese are made of cloth. "The administration's tariff bill represents a fundamentally funda-mentally important turning point in our economic relations rela-tions with the rest of the world; it is aimed at allowing us to set our tariff rates according to the national interest, while granting special help to the local interests that may suffer in the process," Rep. Boggs says. |
