Trump Goes Postal, Abandons 144-Year-Old Unfair Shipping Treaty With China

It's stuff like this that keeps Trump popular.  It's what we hired him to do.

Trump plans to withdraw from a 144-year-old postal treaty that has allowed Chinese companies to ship small packages to the United States at a steeply discounted rate, undercutting American competitors and flooding the market with cheap consumer goods.

Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s hard-line trade adviser, wrote in a Financial Times op-ed last month.

“These disparities have introduced a massive distortion in the eCommerce market.

It is often possible for a Chinese company to sell ‘knockoff’ products through online vendors, such as Amazon or Alibaba, to U.S. consumers for less than it costs for American mailers to ship authentic goods. Moreover, while USPS loses an estimated $1 on every small package that arrives from China, outbound mail of American exporters is charged at well above cost.”

As The New York Times details, a 2015 report from the Inspector General of the United States Postal Service found that the treaty, which was created to ease the flow of mail and small parcels between 192 countries, had not been overhauled to reflect the new realities of eCommerce and China’s aggressive undercutting of international competitors.

The price of shipping a 4.4 pound package, the largest parcel covered by the treaty, from China to the United States is about $5, according to United States estimates, according to post office estimates culled by Mr. Navarro’s staff.

American companies can pay two to four times that amount to ship a similar package from Los Angeles to New York, and much more for packages sent to China.

The “system creates winners and losers,” the report’s author’s concluded, especially China’s national postal service and "Chinese online retailers in the lightweight, low-value package segment at the expense of the U.S. PostalService and American retailers.”

It is not clear how much the disparity costs American taxpayers and retailers, in part because the Postal Service does not release detailed country-by-country shipping breakdowns. A 2014 study, cited in a Postal Service analysis of the issue, estimated that discounted shipping cost industrialized nations as much as $2.1 billion a year in aggregate.

The losses to retailers and manufacturers could be much more, as online commerce expands further.

Typically, Obama ignored this problem, choosing to favor foreign nations, even hostile ones, over our own workers and companies.