Posted on 01/09/2023 8:16:17 AM PST by SoConPubbie
President Joe Biden has quietly continued his predecessor’s America-first tariffs.
Free traders on the left and the right routinely excoriated Donald Trump for his willingness to implement tariffs on foreign imports. With the election of Joe Biden in 2020, many hoped the incoming president would reverse the former president’s “protectionist” trade policies and return to free trade orthodoxy. This, however, never happened. In fact, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, just two weeks ago, pushed back against claims made by the World Trade Organization that the Trump-era tariffs violated international trade rules: The WTO is on “very, very thin ice.”
President Biden has, time and time again, skirted the issue of tariffs. Instead, he has opted to quietly continue his predecessor’s America-first tariff hikes, despite having forcefully criticized Trump’s trade policy with China in 2019: “President Trump may think he’s being tough on China. All that he’s delivered as a consequence of that is American farmers, manufacturers and consumers losing and paying more.” Biden must have conveniently forgotten this previous stance. By keeping in place the Trump tariffs, he has successfully frustrated economic liberals in both the Democratic and Republican parties.
In July of 2022, the Biden administration mulled over the prospect of lifting billions of dollars worth of tariffs on Chinese goods. The rationale was that in doing so, inflation, which has adversely affected American consumers for the past two years, would be eased. This, however, was an economic fallacy. Even the Peterson Institute for International Economics, whose sole mission is to fight for trade liberalization, conceded that the proposed tariff reductions would have a mostly trivial effect on inflation: “The direct effect of removing tariffs on imports from China could lower consumer price index (CPI) inflation by 0.26 percentage point — only marginally reducing inflation.”
After months of silence from the administration, it eventually came to a decision: to do nothing. When push came to shove, Biden’s team realized that, though the tariffs may not be economically sound, they were a political winner. The fact of the matter is that tariff implementation and economic nationalism more broadly are popular with the electorate.
Trump, to his credit, tapped into a very real feeling that economic liberalism and free trade deals do not positively affect rank-and-file American workers in the flyover states. For decades, American cities, once home to booming industries, have been hollowed out by free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Workers in the manufacturing industry have, undoubtedly, been forgotten about. They are told to enter into worker retraining programs and learn new skills. In other words, “suck it up and find something else to do.”
Trump, in echoing some of Pat Buchanan’s rhetoric about free trade, offered the “forgotten man” a little bit of hope that he would no longer fall victim to the global economy. In doing so, Trump was tirelessly lambasted as protectionist, isolationist, and reactionary. What’s more, he was frequently accused by the free-trade elite of inciting trade wars with China and other countries.
This aside, workers in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania applauded Trump for his economic nationalist tendencies. The United Steelworkers union, for instance, has praised President Trump’s tough-on-China trade policy on multiple occasions. The union’s president, Kameen Thompson, has credited the tariffs with reinvigorating the steel industry and allowing for plants to hire more workers. While some may see this as trivial, it is emblematic of a notable boon to domestic manufacturing. Everyone, both on the right and left, should celebrate this development.
When Biden assumed office in 2021, the future of American trade policy seemed uncertain. Interests that benefited from the Trump-era tariffs, though, were quick to urge Biden not to go back to the old tariff regime. Steel groups were especially vocal. In a letter written to the administration in May of 2021, a conglomerate of steel interests stated that “the tariffs have been a success” and that “eliminating the steel tariffs now would undermine the viability of our industry.”
In an attempt to placate both sides of the trade issue, Biden considered only modestly reforming Trump’s tariff policies. Ultimately, though, he smartly kept the tariffs in place.
As for the future of America’s tariff policy, it looks as though not much will change. Tai, in an interview given to Marketplace just last week, signaled that the Trump-era tariffs are probably here to stay: “if you’re looking at a future where the U.S. no longer produces steel or aluminum anymore, the question I would pose to anyone on the street is, would you feel safe?”
Whether the administration’s rationale for keeping the tariffs is national security or protecting domestic industry from foreign competition (or perhaps a confluence of both), one thing is clear: Trump was right on trade, and Biden knows it.
Kinda irrelevant when Biden’s entire job was to secure the White House ‘legally’ so the United States could be driven off a cliff. Ignorance isn’t in play here, it’s evil.
Trump was right about everything ,that’s why they hate him .
Bush and Obama loved tariffs before Trump.
Lots of people know Trump was right about a lot of things.
It is/was the *person*, not usually the policies that people don’t/didn’t like.
Damned good ideas and a hell of a lot of them implemented; but the same brash attitude and attacks that some love, a lot of people hated.
The President sets the tone. Most people are sick of the ‘burn it down/ everybody who disagrees with me is evil and my enemy’ approach on the left and the right. Just my observation as someone who WANTED to see Trump get a second term.
And to a great degree it wasn’t the actual person either...
A lot of neocons were well know to trash Trump on tariffs. They were the same people throwing Pat Buchanan under the bus on the same issue years prior.
Trump makes mistakes but I feel he is “more right” on the issues of our time than any other prominent politician BY FAR.
BS. Quit re writing history like a Soviet....
The only President since WWII to use tariffs effectively was Reagan.
dil·et·tante [ˌdiləˈtänt, diləˈtäntē] NOUN a person who cultivates an area of interest, such as the arts, without real commitment or knowledge: "a wealthy literary dilettante"
Fixed it.
Kiss my ass ignoramus.
The nation is a wreck because the vast majority in the middle got sick of them and the childish BS that you seem to get off on.
IF Trump had acted more like Reagan and less like Alex Jones, we’d be in his 7th year, but he pandered to grade school nitwits like you instead of the 70 percent in the middle who are as sick of this crap from the left as from the right.
Yes, ‘mean tweets’ and painting any disagreement or opposition as unpatriotic cost him the election. Tell me I’m wrong, I don’t care, because the fact is that it’s the 80 percent between the extremes who decide the direction of this country, not the “True Believer” kind a a-holes who act like everyone who doesn’t agree with them is evil and unpatriotic.
Trump playing to mental midgets like you instead of actual Americans is why we have Biden.
Considering his state of dementia, Biden doesn’t know anything.
Biden knows squat. His handlers are making the decisions.
I make the point only because Biden is more lost than Obama was after occupying the Oval Office.
Oh Horse sh!t. Are they sick of 25% inflation and a DOW down 25%? Get away you fool.
The 2020 election was rigged but you probably think a senile pervert really got 81 million legitmate votes.
Tariffs can be extremely effective, when properly implemented, as the founders intended. My main issue with Trump with regard to this, is how he consistently claims that the Chinese are the ones that pay the tariffs, which sounds great to anyone listening, but is factually incorrect.
Tariffs are actually a tax, that the American consumers have to pay. The potentially positive aspect of the process is, it therefore raises the final cost of imported goods, based on the “price + tax = final cost” equation, which therefore makes the final cost of American made products appear more favorable. However, history has shown that inevitably, the American companies have often just raised their prices before taxes, and pocketed the difference.
As tariffs are ultimately just another tax, albeit targeted, our goal should be to go back to implement them fully, as the founders intended, and did, to provide ALL revenue for the federal government. At some point the government decided that revenue stream was too inconsistent, and moved to tax each individual citizen directly, based on their income, rather than their desire to purchase imported items
Any attempts by politicians to implement tariffs since then, have resulted in them just being an additional tax, and possibly even leading to American manufacturers ultimately raising their prices.
Therefore the true fight to implement them, should be to PUT THEM BACK IN PLACE TO REPLACE THE IRS, or at least replace other taxes, rather than just being an additional tax, as Trump implemented. Sure, it worked for a short period, but long term tariffs are not necessarily a good solution, and this whole history should be explained to Americans, verses telling them the falsehood that the Chinese pay the tariffs.
The offset for that is domestic competition. That will prevent price fixing.
“The nation is a wreck because the vast majority in the middle got sick of them and the childish BS that you seem to get off on.
IF Trump had acted more like Reagan and less like Alex Jones, we’d be in his 7th year, but he pandered to grade school nitwits like you instead of the 70 percent in the middle who are as sick of this crap from the left as from the right” You are no Republican you are no Tconservative you believe Trump childish and does Mean Tweets because that’s what the media told you to think and you are a non-thinker. Joe is the worst president of my lifetime and I hear no criticism from you.
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