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Removing the Chicken Tax Could Resurrect Foreign-Made Pickup Trucks in the US

If you live in the United States of America and you’re in the market for a mid-size pickup truck, options are fairly limited. By fairly limited, we’re referring to four models, two of which being similar machines underneath the body shell. Who or what is to blame for the sorry state of the segment? The chicken tax.
2015 Ford Ranger facelift 1 photo
Photo: Ford
At the end of 1963, US President Lyndon B. Johnson imposed the chicken tax, a 25 percent tariff on imported goods such as potato starch, brandy, dextrin and light-duty pickup trucks. The latter product is still subjected to the chicken tax 52 years later since the tariff was voted, with the sole objective to protect the domestic truck makers from the foreign competitors.

What started as a war against the chicken meat’s reduction in price as a consequence of intensive farming after World War II is now affecting American truck manufacturers as well. Just to name the biggest loser of this antiquated tax, we’ll mention the dearly missed Ford Ranger. Other mid-size pickup trucks the US consumer would buy are the Mazda BT-50 (the Ranger’s twin model), Toyota Hilux, VW Amarok, and the Mitsubishi Triton, trucks that are made in places like Thailand, Argentina, and so forth.

So Ford can’t sell its Ranger compact pickup truck because the US Government says that it is protecting manufacturers like Ford through the chicken tax. While the chicken tax was relevant 52 years ago, it doesn’t have a place in the age of globalization. Furthermore, the previously mentioned trucks would double the current amount of offerings in the segment, namely the Chevrolet Colorado, the mechanically similar GMC Canyon, Toyota Tacoma, and the Nissan Frontier.

Instead of blaming the McChicken for this mess, blame those lazy guys in the government and they’re antiquated views on protecting this country’s economical interests. On a side note, some politicians and legislators are preparing to phase out the chicken tax though a legislative piece dubbed the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. In a nutshell, we’re dealing with an agreement between the Pacific Rim countries and the European Union.

By lowering the trade barriers and aligning import regulations between the EU and US, foreign-made compact pickup trucks would once again be sold in the United States. Furthermore, fierce competition from outside the Red, White, and Blue will see General Motors (and the rest of the Detroit Big 3) invest capital into new technologies, breakthroughs that would see this pickup truck segment get better than ever before.

Congress passed a bill last week, giving Obama the authority to negotiate free-trade agreements with the Congress in an up-or-down vote manner. While the final version of the bill is expected to go to Congress this fall, the European Union will take longer to finish its version of this free-trade agreement. On an ending note, manufacturers will take their sweet time adapting their mid-size pickup trucks to US specifications.
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About the author: Mircea Panait
Mircea Panait profile photo

After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well.
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