Why we pay 16.5% tax on shirts from Bangladesh and 0% on shirts from Colombia

Protecting U.S. trade means following an incredibly elaborate set of rules spelled out in a giant book that's more than 3,000 pages long. Michael Cone, a customs and international trade attorney in New York, calls it "the book of everything." Its official name is the “Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States.”

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/12/06/247361423/the-giant-book-that-creates-and-destroys-entire-industries