This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 15th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

What people don't understand about trade can hurt us all and politicians are more than happy to take

full advantage. Scott Linsicum, a trade attorney, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute,

discusses the many enduring misconceptions about trade.

There's one fact about trade that I think if most people understood

they would be far more supportive and that is are necessary imports

into the United States is used by Americans

to make other stuff

and that these are necessary imports.

Correct.

You know, there's a serious misconception that everything we import. It's all cheap

t-shirts. Reality is that between 55 and 60 percent of everything we import per year is used by American manufacturers

to produce other stuff and to remain globally competitive in producing that stuff.

So that misconception alone creates a dramatic bias against true free trade and in support of an export-only

mercantile policy of the sort you hear all the time in Washington.

But it also renders, I think, irrelevant a lot of the picture of imports versus exports

that we see, like a lot of the data, well if you understand that more than half of this

is stuff we use to make other stuff, then a lot of those charts and stats don't mean a whole lot.

Exactly. You know one of the big problems we have right now in the trade debate is that even free traders are pushing a mercantilist export-centric

message and what that does is it implicitly reinforces the idea that imports are bad and that

meaningless statistics like the trade deficit are a scorecard of sorts.

So when the trade deficit goes up, we're winning in trade, or sorry, when the trade

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