This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 20th, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There's a whole lot of legislating going on at the end of 2010, but where are the trade agreements?

And will the T-partiers that are coming to populate new seats in Congress be more or less

enthusiastic about free trade?

Dan Griswold, director of the Cato Institute Center for Trade Policy Studies, and author of the book

Mad About Trade, comments.

The President seems to have at least rediscovered trade in the second year of his presidency 2010 and the state of

the union he announced something called the National Export Initiative with the

goal over ambitious goal I think of doubling exports over the next five years, but nonetheless it's on behalf of promoting trade.

And then just recently we've had, it's really something of a breakthrough.

We have three trade agreements that were signed in the Bush administration,

free trade agreements with Korea, Colombia, and Panama, and they have just languished

since then. Really ever since the Democrats took over Congress, They're quite beholden to organized

labor on trade and had no interest in these agreements and President Obama hasn't

had much to say about them. But at the G20 meeting in June in Canada he pledged to the Korean president

President Lee that he would work with the Koreans to make some tweaks to the

agreement so that he could submit it to Congress.

Well, they've made the tweaks, particularly having to do with automobiles.

You know, Korea is a great market for the United States.

They are our number seven export markets.

So this is a commercially significant deal.

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