The Tariff Mismatch

"This system is costing people quite a lot of money, and the more I looked into it, the more shocked I became," Gresser said. "How did we let this happen?"

The answer in some cases -- though by no means all -- is that Congress has never gotten around to lowering certain tariffs that were once designed to protect major U.S. industries even though the industry in question has undergone major changes or almost disappeared.

Sneaker tariffs are a classic example. According to the American Apparel and Footwear Association, the tariffs have their origins in the 1920s, when U.S. tire companies -- which then made rubber footwear -- wanted to fend off an onslaught of cheap shoes from Czechoslovakia. In later decades, U.S. athletic-shoe makers lobbied successfully to maintain protection against imports from places such as Taiwan, so tariffs remained high on sneakers even as they fell on leather shoes. The tariffs, however, haven't kept shoe firms from moving most of their production to developing nations with low-cost, high-productivity labor pools -- China in particular.

These days, New Balance Athletic Shoe Inc. is practically the only sneaker company that continues to manufacture in the United States (specifically, in Massachusetts and Maine, where about 25 percent of the shoes it sells are made). Although New Balance strongly favors keeping tariffs on some types of shoes it makes domestically, it agrees with most of the rest of the industry that other shoe tariffs ought to be eliminated. But no global trade deal has come along in the past few years to afford an opportunity to do so. And although the North American Free Trade Agreement eliminated duties on Mexican products, shoemakers have generally resisted moving operations to Mexico, partly because of onerous NAFTA "rules of origin" requiring them to show that shoes shipped to the United States don't contain other countries' materials or manufacturing input.

The current WTO negotiations will presumably offer the next chance to comprehensively modify U.S. tariffs. So far, however, other issues in the talks have overshadowed the impact on U.S. consumers.

Known as the "Doha round" because they were launched at a meeting in the capital of Qatar in 2001, the talks are aimed at spurring greater global trade in general, with a particular focus on giving developing countries a bigger share of the gains. Because poor nations depend heavily on agriculture, much of the debate has revolved around proposals to cut the tariff protection and government payments that farmers get in the United States, the European Union and other rich countries. Farmers in poor lands face serious obstacles in selling their goods abroad, and they sometimes suffer from worldwide crop gluts that arise because subsidy payments in rich countries lead to overproduction.

This week's meeting in Hong Kong was originally supposed to speed the talks toward a final agreement by producing a blueprint that would include details such as the type of formulas to be used in cutting tariffs. But negotiators have already acknowledged that they are unlikely to agree on much more than a schedule for striking a deal by the end of 2006. Because the WTO operates by consensus, all 149 member nations must sign on to an accord, which means all must believe they have more to gain than lose, both politically and economically -- and they are far from reaching that point.

Most importantly, the European Union -- fearful of arousing the wrath of farmers in France and other E.U. countries -- has refused to offer the prospect of deep cuts in its agricultural tariffs. In response to accusations from Brazilians and others that European intransigence could scuttle the talks, E.U. officials retort that Brazil hasn't even submitted a proposal to trim tariffs on its heavily protected industries.

U.S. consumers' interests haven't gone completely without notice. In a bid to grab the high ground in the talks, the Bush administration proposed in 2002 to eliminate all U.S. tariffs on manufactured goods by 2015, provided other WTO members would respond in kind. A "tariff-free world" would create major opportunities for U.S. exporters, and scrapping U.S. tariffs would save Americans $18 billion a year, the administration said.

To drive home the point, the trade representative at the time, Robert B. Zoellick, held a press conference where he displayed a basket of goods, including flashlights, pacifiers, disposable cameras, men's sweaters and children's clothing. Without tariffs, those items, which cost $202 at Wal-Mart, would cost $170 -- "a heck of a price rollback," as Zoellick put it.

But the proposal was widely derided as pie-in-the-sky. In part, that was because it was certain to be rejected by other countries, which tend to have much higher tariffs than the United States' and would thus have to make much deeper cuts. Moreover, powerful forces within the United States would never stand for a zeroing-out of tariffs, and their clout in Congress -- which must approve any WTO pact -- is formidable.

Among these is the textile industry, which contends that its survival depends on reasonably high tariffs, especially now that global trade rules no longer impose ceilings on the amounts of textiles and apparel that individual countries can export.