Harvard professor Robert Lawrence, who specializes in international trade, proposes that the “chicken tax” is actually what killed Detroit, by insulating it from real competition in light-duty trucks for 40 years…. It all started in 1962, when the European Common Market barred access to US frozen-chicken imports on the grounds they were devastating German producers. After diplomacy failed, President John F. Kennedy Jr. imposed a tax [that] applied to imports of all non-North American trucks.
—so writes John Voelcker in GreenCarReports