Investors.com posted an editorial yesterday about the China currency bill the Senate is planning to introduce this week. The National Retail Federation (NRF) has stated their opinion that passage of the bill will cost American jobs–not create them.

Today’s Wall Street Journal (not linked–subscribers only) posted an editorial titled, “The Obama-Romney Tariff.” The article at the Wall Street Journal describes the bill as “the most dangerous trade legislation in many years.”

The article at the Wall Street Journal reports:

The legislation is now coming to the floor because Senate Democrats want protectionist political cover against unions in return for voting on the free-trade pacts with Columbia, Panama and Korea that President Obama finally sent to Congress yesterday. But what is cynical posturing in Washington may look more threatening to the rest of the world, and once trade wars start they can be hard to stop.

We do not trade with China on an even level–they use slave labor and they manipulate their currency to give themselves an advantage. The Chinese are not fair trading partners. I understand that, and I would like to see that change. However, this may not be the time to attempt that change. We need to clean up the internal downward forces on the American economy so that we approach this problem from a position of strength rather than a position of weakness. The answers to America’s economic problems are internal–they are not external. This currency bill is not Smoot-Hawley, but unfortunately, it may have a similar result.