Tarriffs do not hamper the GDP....
Let me ask you something... have you ever heard of Harley Davidson?
DO you know why they have been successful? Have a single clue?
Tarriffs. The large tarriffs placed on large engine motorcycles in 1983, by none other than Reagan himself, has allowed a company that would be dead by now to be what it is.
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/04/02/business/us-raises-tariff-for-motorcycles.html
When you have nation states dumping, and that do not have remotely a fair or comparable social or economic structure trading with nations that do, you foster the export of wealth and the destruction of the middle class.
If there has been a failure, a demonstrable failure of the US post WWII it has been its abject failure to utilize Trade to lift up the rest of the world, and the biggest reason FREE TRADE!
Had rational and smart bilateral trade agreements been made that required incremental improvements by developing countries that wished access to our markets then the US and Western Europe could have literally help lift a good bit of the world out of poverty and oppression.. instead they embraced a completely idiotic multilateral free trade system that allowed anyone access with little to no requirements on those states.
Free Trade as executed in the latter part of the 20th century is a net destructive force on western civilization as a whole. Its shameful and indefensible, socially, economically and morally.
First of all, tariffs DO hamper GDP. Tariffs on anything purchased with a tariff attached and used to offer other products or services has just artificially increased the cost and therefore prices of those goods. Also the money that would have gone back into the economy has just been wasted by going instead to the federal government.
“Free Trade as executed in the latter part of the 20th century” is an oxymoron. Government has so unconstitutionally and radically inserted itself into our economy that it has little resemblance to a free market.
“Free Trade as executed in the latter part of the 20th century is a net destructive force on western civilization as a whole. Its shameful and indefensible, socially, economically and morally.”
+1