“Tarriffs NO! Better trade agreements, YES!”
The founding fathers favored high tariffs. The developing US economy prospered in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries under high tariffs. During that time the tariff funded the federal government.
Since the modern trade agreements began to be negotiated and signed (past 25 years) the average standard of living of the American family has declined for the first time in US history, the US manufacturing sector has been gutted, and economic growth in the US has stalled. Where are the analyses proving the zero tariff policy has been positive for US workers and the US economy? They do not exist. The 25 year free trade experiment has been an abysmal failure.
Any free trade agreement requiring thousands of pages to document, a bureaucracy to administer, and the surrendering of national sovereignty to perpetuate has nothing to do with freedom. Why does the TPP require over 5000 pages. It takes a lot of paper and ink to spell out the special privileges, exemptions, subsidies, and other provisions favoring specific countries, industries or individuals.
One of the latest international trade bureaucracy rulings was to penalize the US for a law passed by Congress requiring country of origin to appear on imported foods. What is wrong with letting the consumer know where food or other products originated? It is free trade for an international body to order the US to stop country of origin labeling? Yes, our Republican Congress caved to this international body interfering with our national sovereignty.
Bring back the tariffs. Subsidized foreign factories should be paying for access to the US market. It is not free trade when foreign factories receiving export credits from their home governments have free access to the US market and US companies pay the highest corporate tax rates in the world for the same privilege. End these one sided trade deals.
Mark Levin will tell you that high tariffs led to the Great Depression under Hoover. I suspect he is leaving out other salient facts.
If you want to decrease wages, decrease exports, increase prices, decrease the standard of living, increase the cost of doing business, then you’re for tariffs.
They *may* make sense for a small beginning economy; not now.