Well, when US producers pay 35% tax and have a ton of other regulations and taxes, I completely understand it.
It’s like we playing a game of basketball and we insisted on placing our team in the locker room during the match. Is it a wonder other countries are getting our manufacturing jobs?
Even Canada and the EU have a fraction of our taxes on business. It’s crazy.
They could be more efficient by removing their pollution controls, as is done in China:
Their quality is probably already better than Chinese steel.
As far as cutting price, why should American steel workers have to compete on price with a workers who get paid a few dollars a day?
Jacoby outs himself as a Free Traitor.
By the way, Jeff is obviously completely ignorant. Why post stupid?
The Chinese aren’t selling their steel cheap out of the kindness of their hearts.
China has a wholly different type of economy. If the government targets a foreign producer and decides to drive them out of business, they can do that. One producer may have an advantage in one way or another. But free trade implies that the producers are otherwise equal. This is not the case with communist suppliers. In the labor market a Chinese must have the permission of the government to leave his job, making him a slave. Also, China has developed many times the necessary production capacity to supply steel to their ghost cities. Now it sits idle, so they can sell well below the prices of competitors who live in a real market economy.
I no longer believe in free trade because there is no such thing between societies so different from one another. The TPP may well spell the end of American production of just about everything.
So-called free trade is a one-way street. We take all their stuff, and they use various laws and rules to block out ours. Our shelves are filled with Chinese goods. Needless to say, they sell very little American stuff.
And the same is true of most of the other countries of the world. We take Mexican stuff, they block ours. We take French stuff, they block ours.
When I was a kid, there were factories all over the place where you could find a job. Now, almost all of them have shut down. And the balance of payments deficit has been killing us for years.
Was this written in the 1970’s?
Because, the situation they describe occurred in the 1970’s, not today (on the steel dumping countries were different).
And,we know how that ended up. The American steel industry was decimated. Tens of thousands of Americans lost their jobs. Entire regions were destroyed economically.
That's why we'll never be free until they're hanging from a tree.
They never mention the National Security dynamics of owning the means of industrial production, agriculture, transportation, technology, and commodities...to include energy. Nor do they address the long term transfer of wealth...the transfer of Capital Stock the likes of which has never before been seen.
Except maybe the Roman Empire and the Egyptian Empire before it.
I am so sick of “free traitors”. America became an industrial superpower with the judicious use of tariffs on imported goods. It is the only way we can level the playing field against state-owned industries in Europe and Asia.
FYI, Chia became and industrial superpower through tariffs and other protective measures so it does work even in modern times.
I certainly disagree with this.
Over the past 2 years Saudi Arabia has dumped its oil on the world market with one purpose....run the American fracking/wildcat operators out of business. 2/3rds of them are gone, gobbled up by the bigs, and the other third are in line to be gobbled up.
Who really are the bigs except for comglomerates with how many owing allegiance to what country sitting on their boards of directors?
You don’t just run an industry out of business. You make it susceptible to takeover. And then the dumpers control the market and they raise the price beyond what any tariff would have cost.
Check out oil in 18 months. Probably back to 100 a barrel after its low of approx. 25 dollars. And why was it so low? So Saudi could run the Americans out of business.
And the US consumers who benefit from the cheap Chinese steel can get jobs at the Chinese steel factories.
See? Now every one is happy.
While that's not going to happen because of the way it works in China, protectionism lets our domestic steel industry loaf along with outdated manufacturing processes. The same argument was made with Japanese steel back in the 1960's. Japan replaced their plants because we bombed them into dust during WWII. They replaced them new technology while the US limped along with 1890's furnaces. Maybe it's time for the US to get competitive again and for the steel unions to start asking for realistic wages given foreign competition instead of US consumers being asked to subsidize an inefficient industry.
What should piss you off even more is: Guess who keeps the tariff and import taxe revenues, but did absolutely nothing to earn them, yet you pay higher prices?
Free Traitors™ like Jacoby are helping them every step of the way.
A lot of the ChiCom steel exports is not up to snuff. It’s chemistry does not match the accompanying paper work. In other words the heat numbers are faked.
Arguing about the necessity of both tariffs and protectionism in general at this point is like arguing whether to put a tourniquet on a bleeding soldier during the civil war and pausing to contemplate the reason for the war, discussing states rights vs slavery. Just rendering first aid doesn’t solve the root cause of the problem which is the war. What?! Just put the tourniquet on the poor guy before he dies. We will discuss the reasons for the war later.!
I did some shopping at The Home Depot yesterday, looking at all those beautiful tools of every description. Hardly any were made in the United States, most were made in China that I checked, which is something that should warm the hearts of plenty of posters on this site. They were all American companies, by the way.
$505,000,000,000 flowing in one direction EVERY YEAR is stupid, asinine, and extremely dumb. China can export all they want to Walmart, so long as US manufacturers can export to China without restrictions, road blocks, and other subtle ways to impede imports.
More words of “wisdom” from the free traitors. This is the same gang that gave us nafta and gatt. And a destroyed industrial base.
I like tariffs just fine. I like antidumping tariffs even moar.