Posted on 03/09/2018 4:45:09 AM PST by reaganaut1
Trump's tariffs are a bad idea.
President Donald Trump deserves applause for boosting the prospects for this country’s forgotten manufacturing workers, particularly in the steel and aluminum industries. Democrats lately have neglected these Americans. Hillary Clinton barely campaigned among them in Michigan during the 2016 general election, and she thoroughly ignored them in Wisconsin.
Alas, President Trump is doing this all wrong. He likely will hurt the very middle class that he has championed since his escalator ride onto the political stage.
Trump aims to protect U.S. metal makers with new taxes of 25 percent on foreign steel and 10 percent on overseas aluminum. “Tariffs” is just a jumped-up word for taxes on imports. Like other business taxes, these will trickle down through higher prices (average new cars: up an estimated $177; cars and appliances: up some 5 to 10 percent), lower wages, curbed output, and outsourcing.
These taxes will haunt metal-buying companies.
“This is a $347 million tax on America’s brewers,” Beer Institute CEO Jim McGreevy explained Monday on the Fox Business Network.
“We think the estimate for beer is about 20,000,” he said, referring to job losses tied to costlier aluminum cans. “That’s brewers, brewery workers, waitresses, bartenders, truck drivers. These are people that rely on a vibrant beer industry for their livelihoods.”
“Here’s a simple, ‘real-life’ impact of the tariffs,” a friend on the West Coast tells me. His metal-products company serves the aircraft and aerospace industries, among others. “In late January, we bid on a job, but didn’t get the purchase order until the end of February. Now we are ordering the raw material to fabricate the parts, and the price increases have killed our profits.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
“Conservatives” have been all in on this “free trade” advice for decades. How is that working out? GREAT, for the socialist/totalitarian governments who NEVER reciprocate the “free trade.” For America, we are now a nation of tattoo parlors, pawn shops, massage store fronts, a gig economy fueled more by government checks, than an industrial backbone.”
Well stated!
It began after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and employment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act: The consensus view among economists and economic historians is that the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff exacerbated the Great Depression.
Part and parcel.
We subsidize those lower prices at the expense of our standard of living, you idiot (Deroy...what a name).
Those practicing “Buy American” willingly spend more.
But it’s a great scare tactic for the demonstrably-stupid, without regard for the fact that this is all a ploy to negotiate trade deals favorable to the US vs. the capitulation of past administrations.
This article is a bad idea lol!
The author of the article might be reminiscing about the Rust Belt that occurred in the 70s during the recession and during the gas crisis and has forgotten those two major events that prompted the dying of the Rust Belt. It was a time when industry started moving offshore in order to find cheaper labor. Of course the unions might had a bit to do with it.
It was a different time and they were outside influences to the problem unlike anything seen before or since.
An interesting interview to watch was with Austrian British economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek who mentions several factors coming together which invalidated the John Maynard Keynes work in macroeconomics.
You sound like a deranged Democrat comparing these targeted tariffs to the Great Depression. Funny how POTUS manages to get that reaction in normally same people.
Excellent post, but I suspect AUTOMATION has been a much bigger factor in declining industrial jobs over the last 40 years than anything else.
“Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act: The consensus view among economists and economic historians is that the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff exacerbated the Great Depression.”
Nope. Read the rest of the wiki page you just quoted.
Smoot-Hawley played a very small almost insignificant role.
Thanks for your opinion NeverTrump NRO. Now GFY.
??????
And you have A Nice Day too.
Yes and no. It sure didn’t help.
“Yes and no. It sure didn’t help.”
Ok. Fair enough.
The OP implied tariffs STARTED the GD.
You are too dense to understand this but if you can’t find “quality” steel from the 70% made in the US you probably don’t need to be in the market.
Consider that the administration has done the following:
-- Forced Japan to accept restraints on auto exports. The agreement set total Japanese auto exports at 1.68 million vehicles in 1981-82, 8 percent below 1980 exports. Two years later the level was permitted to rise to 1.85 million.(33) Clifford Winston of the Brookings Institution found that the import limits have actually cost jobs in the U.S. auto industry by making it possible for the sheltered American automakers to raise prices and limit production. In 1984, Winston writes in Blind Intersection? Policy and the Automobile Industry, 32,000 jobs were lost, U.S. production fell by 300,000 units, and profits for U.S. firms increased $8.9 billion. The quotas have also made the Japanese firms potentially more formidable rivals because they have begun building assembly plants in the United States.(34) They also shifted production to larger cars, introducing to American firms competition they did not have before the quotas were created. In 1984, it was estimated that higher prices for domestic and imported cars cost consumers $2.2 billion a year.(35) At the height of the dollar's exchange rate with the yen in 1984-85, the quotas were costing American consumers the equivalent of $11 billion a year.(36)
-- Tightened up considerably the quotas on imported sugar. Imports fell from an annual average of 4.85 million tons in 1979-81 to an annual average of 2.86 million tons in 1982-86. Not only did this continued practice force Americans to spend more than other consumers for sugar, but it created hardships for Latin American countries and the Philippines, which depend on sugar exports for economic development. The quota program undermined President Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative and intensified the international debt crisis.(37)
-- Negotiated to increase restrictiveness of the Multifiber Arrangement and extended restrictions to previously unrestricted textiles. The administration unilaterally changed the rule of origin in order to restrict textile and apparel imports further and imposed a special ceiling on textiles from the People's Republic of China.(38) Finally, it pressured Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea, the largest exporters of textiles and apparel to the United States, into highly restrictive bilateral agreements. All told, textile and apparel restrictions cost Americans more than $20 billion a year.(39) The Reagan administration has stated several times that textile and apparel imports should grow no faster than the domestic market.(40)
-- Required 18 countries--including Brazil, Spain, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Finland, and Australia, as well as the European Community--to accept "voluntary restraint agreements" to reduce steel imports, guaranteeing domestic producers a share of the American market. When 3 countries not included in the 18--Canada, Sweden, and Taiwan-- increased steel exports to the United States, the administration demanded talks to check the increase. The administration also imposed tariffs and quotas on specialty steel. These policies, with their resulting shortages, have severely squeezed American steel-using firms, making them less competitive in world markets and eliminating more than 52,000 jobs.(41)
-- Imposed a five-year duty, beginning at 45 percent, on Japanese motorcycles for the benefit of Harley Davidson, which admitted that superior Japanese management was the cause of its problems.(42)
-- Raised tariffs on Canadian lumber and cedar shingles.
-- Forced the Japanese into an agreement to control the price of computer memory-chip exports and increase Japanese purchases of American-made chips. When the agreement was allegedly broken, the administration imposed a 100 percent tariff on $300 million worth of electronics goods. This episode teaches a classic lesson in how protectionism comes back to haunt a country's producers. The quotas established as a result of the agreement have created a severe shortage of memory chips and higher prices for American computer makers, putting them at a disadvantage with foreign competitors. Only two American firms are still making these chips, accounting for a small percentage of the world market.(43)
-- Removed Third World countries from the duty-free import program for developing nations on several occasions.
-- Pressed Japan to force its automakers to buy more American-made parts.(44) -- Demanded that Taiwan, West Germany, Japan, and Switzerland restrain their exports of machine tools, with some market shares rolled back to 1981 levels. Other countries were warned not to increase their shares of the U.S. market.
-- Accused the Japanese of dumping roller bearings, because the price did not rise to cover a fall in the value of the yen. The U.S. Customs Service was ordered to collect duties equal to the so-called dumping margins.(45)
-- Accused the Japanese of dumping forklift trucks and color picture tubes.(46)
-- Failed to ask Congress to end the ban on the export of Alaskan oil and of timber cut from federal lands, a measure that could substantially increase U.S. exports to Japan.
-- Redefined "dumping" in order "to make it easier to bring charges of unfair trade practices against certain competitors."(47)
-- Beefed up the Export-Import Bank, an institution dedicated to promoting the exports of a handful of large companies at the expense of everyone else.(48)
-- Extended quotas on imported clothespins.
Bzzzzzt - no, wrong.
http://buchanan.org/blog/the-isolationist-myth-165
Ignoring and Denying the Chinese military complex is purposely dumping
steel , good and metals well below COST on the US market as a strategy to
destroy our manufacturing capabilities makes this BS just more Globalist Bushy Never Trump spin .
These NR Globalist Corporatist puppets are still pissed that TPP was not passed and the US freedoms destroyed .
A couple of years ago I saw a great documentary on the history of Bethlehem Steel. The decline of the American steel industry was one of those textbook cases where every player involved — management, labor, and government — seemed to make the worst decision at every step along the way.
The hysteria and immature childish hissy fit from the globalist Free Traitors™(like YOU) is what caused this unnecessary panic.
Don’t forget the American CEO’s who send American jobs overseas in favor of cheap labor, knowing there is no penalty when importing these now foreign made goods back into the U.S., all so they can afford 5 vacation homes instead of just 2.
If protectionism is such a bad thing then why does the rest of the world embrace it so?
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