Posted on 03/10/2017 8:57:25 PM PST by TBP
Being a world-class economist, my colleague Walter Williams spends much of his time asking probing questions. Here’s one that he posed to me recently by e-mail:
Don:
I don’t think there are tariffs on coffee and I know of no organization calling for coffee tariffs. I wonder why.
Great, probing question.
The answer is that there are very few coffee growers in the United States. In the U.S. states, coffee is grown commercially only in Hawaii. Coffee is also grown commercially also in Puerto Rico. The result of this small number of American coffee growers is that these growers are too small in number to form a powerful-enough interest group. But, of course, coffee is consumed massively throughout the U.S. (I’m drinking some right now, by the way. It’s from Guatemala. Yum!) The pain to consumers caused by restrictions on coffee imports would be too great relative to the gains to American coffee growers; politically it would be a bad move for most members of Congress to support protective tariffs on coffee.
Yet if Congress and U.S. presidential administrations really were, as their members often pretende, intent on apolitically using U.S. trade policy to “level the playing field” or to otherwise correct for distortions in global markets induced by other governments’ destructive policies, we likely should see U.S. tariffs on coffee imports.
I haven’t researched the matter, but I’d be shocked to discover that the governments of coffee-growing countries such as Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Brazil, and Jamaica engage in none of the policies that are typically alleged to create “uneven playing fields” in global markets. If Uncle Sam really were so self-sacrificingly and apolitically intent on using tariffs and other trade restrictions to improve global markets, why does Uncle Sam not use such tariffs and restrictions in the coffee market?
The bottom line, of course, is that every trade restriction is simultaneously justified publicly as a righteous intervention against some foreign evil-doing while, in fact, it is a monopoly-power privilege granted by an unethical government to a greedy and powerful domestic interest group.
Coffee growing states made donations to the xlintonista foundation?
I’m a hard-core gardener for a lotta years and you cannot buy viable coffee seeds. Kinda like tobacco. Maybe Colombia shipped the drugs in coffee tares starting in the 50s and it just kinda ‘stayed that way’.
Did we lose our phenomenal coffee agriculture to South America?
Why no tariff on chocolate?............
They tried to grow coffee here in the late 1800s. Didn’t work........
As an attorney would say, “asked and answered.”
CC
I’m no economist, but isn’t a tariff typically placed on a competing item produced by a foreign country? Cars, for example. If we don’t grow coffee, why would we put an import tariff on it? They aren’t undercutting American coffee growers. And I like coffee.
In other words, not a “great, probing question” that speaks to trade imbalances.
We do — in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Kona coffee comes form Hawaii.
Viable tobacco seeds are available (for now) from many sources on the ‘net...
I know because I’ve “grown my own” for years, and Colorado has good weather for tobacco if the hail doesn’t get your leaf...
I don’t know. Ask Ghirardelli.
Just a false argument against Trump’s possible tariffs.
As mentioned, there is little American coffee growing industry.
Not sure I’m in favor of tariffs in most cases, but the article is disingenuous.
“Yet if Congress and U.S. presidential administrations really were, as their members often pretende, intent on apolitically using U.S. trade policy to “level the playing field” or to otherwise correct for distortions in global markets induced by other governments’ destructive policies, we likely should see U.S. tariffs on coffee imports.”
Utterly stupid. It we had large regions of the country with the climate for commercially growing coffee, then it might make sense. The free traitors just wont stop, will they?
I’m surprised moochelle didn’t think of it! ..........
They are always looking for revenue sources. A small tariff on coffee imports would be fine by me and I drink a lot of coffee and tea as well
!....
Ok, I forgot about Hawaii. Kona is quite pricey if I recall. I don’t know if there is enough Kona to even be competitive in the normal coffee market. I can’t say I’ve ever had Puerto Rican coffee, but I’ll give it a try.
If push comes to shove we can grow better coffee than anyone with greenhouses, robots, and injections of cannabis. LOL.
So we obviously need a tariff to drive up the prices on imported coffee so Kona can compete.
Protect American coffee jobs!
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