Trump wants to lower all the trade barriers. He wants reciprocity. We must be willing to confront China and the EU. Otherwise our industrial base and good paying jobs will go abroad. The US is the most lucrative market in the world. We have and have had all the leverage, but were afraid to use it. Trump is doing exactly the right thing.
If you mean that we should have a net $0 trade balance with every other country, I don't want to level the field.
The US is the largest consumer economy in the world and it makes sense that we buy more from many other countries than they buy from us.
Other countries are levying higher tariffs on our goods and erect non-monetary trade barriers.
True, and by doing so they're artificially holding down the standard of living of their populations. Why would we want to do the same?
All a tariff does is force us to pay more for a good than someone else is willing to sell it to us for. Where's the benefit to us in that?
If other countries want to sacrifice in order to sell us cheap goods, fine.
The Chinese have been dumping steel and aluminum on our markets destroying our domestic industries.
If there's a real national security threat tariffs might be appropriate, but given that we still produce 80% of our own steel I'm not convinced.
Again, we have many, many more jobs involved in making things from steel than in making steel itself. If we have someone willing to sell us steel below cost we would be crazy not to take advantage and would create many more jobs as a result.
Trump wants to lower all the trade barriers.
He missed a good opportunity with TPP.
How do you think these barriers get removed? It's via negotiation - exactly the kind of negotiation we did with TPP which would have vastly lowered and simplified the tariff structure with 11 of our allies and been a significant blow to China.
The US has always been the big dog in global trade and we've had the confidence in our own capabilities to not do self-destructive things when our trading partners got protectionist.
It's served us very well overall and I don't understand how we became so fearful.
I want to move forward and win the trade game, and if other countries are willing to impoverish their populations for a while by putting up barriers I'm OK with it, because I know it can't last.
China, among others, has a vast, growing middle class who aren't going to be satisfied keeping their standard of living down to enable cheap exports.
I want us to be the ones selling them stuff, not the ones hunkered down behind a trade wall watching the world move forward.