The U.S. Supreme Court has removed a major barricade for cross-border e-commerce, ruling that so long as a product isn't pirated, U.S. retailers can import it without violating copyright law. In practice, that means an online retailer can sell U.S. customers many products that are lower priced"”and were never intended to be sold in the U.S."”without breaking the law.
Congress and the Administration do not understand the relationship between the U.S. merchant fleet, the military and trade. This lack of understanding has created haphazard policies that are gutting the fleet and inhibiting the private sector's ability to recapitalize our aging maritime industry. The time for action is now. Congress and the Administration are considering budget proposals that, if unopposed, would destroy the U.S. maritime industry and hand over our maritime supremacy to foreign carriers.
The U.S. Senate has overwhelmingly passed a nonbinding proposal to allow states to collect sales tax on internet sellers that have no presence within their borders.
Once one accepts the importance of manufacturing, the next question is how is it doing? Is U.S. manufacturing healthy and not in need of a national manufacturing policy or is it in trouble and in need of smarter policies?
Building America's Future called for dramatically ramping up long-term investment in the nation's infrastructure after the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) released its 2013 Infrastructure Report Card, which graded America's infrastructure a D+ overall.
The number of retail thieves apprehended annually continues to be about six million, research indicates, but the picture is much worse than that figure suggests. More than 78 percent of shrink is due to shoplifting by customers or retail employees. New products in fast-paced categories such as electronics, perfumes and sportswear being brought to market every year at premium prices are among the most likely to be stolen. Fresh meat remains a high-theft category for supermarkets and hypermarkets.
To cope with the larger vessels that will transit through the Panama Canal when its expansion is complete in 2015, Central American countries must dramatically improve their intermodal road and port network infrastructure, the quality of their trucking services and strengthen their institutional coordination, two studies issued today by the Inter-American Development Bank show.
The federal government told an appeals court that industry objections to its latest changes to the hours-of-service rules for truck drivers boil down to "simple scientific disputes" and that the government should be free to use its discretion in such cases.
As businesses and governments implement cost-cutting and other efficiencies to help them recover from the deep recession, now is the time to consider collaborative purchasing as both a short- and long-term strategy to cut costs.