Posted on 03/21/2016 7:38:46 AM PDT by xzins
Sorry but Kevin D. Williamson is a minor official in the liliputian army of the GOP Establishment...
“You’re assuming we can’t manufacture anything here. Once the Chinese tariffs are imposed every businessman with excess production capacity at his plants will rush in to beat that price. And these aren’t all low paying jobs. It takes more than line workers to run a factory. Thousands of factories have been closed thanks to open borders trade. All those jobs, from president and managers and engineers down to the workers on the line, will come booming back.”
Free lunches do not exist. The reason for adding a 45% tariff to Chinese goods is too increase their price to a point where US manufacturers can compete. All the consumer products subject to this tariff will increase in price by 45%. This will result in a 45% decrease in your standard of living.
Tariffs are income transfers to the group who makes the protected items from those who buy them. It is corporate welfare. You may like the idea, but you cannot say that it is a conservative idea.
Actually a very low tariff would accomplish that for most goods. The point of a heavy tariff is to completely lock the Chinese out. Then domestic producers would compete on price, eventually settling on a price where manufacturers adhering to civilized law and paying first world wages could make a profit.
Up to the 1980s many advanced electronic products were manufactured in the US. Those products were affordable and falling in price every year in accordance with Moore's Law despite the lack of Chinese slave labor.
Your claim that everything would cost far more is a globalist lie, and we're not buying it anymore.
“Your claim that everything would cost far more is a globalist lie, and we’re not buying it anymore.”
Your claim that tariffs won’t significantly raise the cost of living and lower living standards has as much basis in economics as a claim that raising the minimum wage won’t cost jobs.
Yet with tariffs American workers had the highest wages on earth. With GATT, NAFTA, MFN status for China and soon the TPP worker's incomes have been stagnating or declining for 43 years.
So what to believe, theories funded by globalist financial gamblers and manipulators or my damned lying eyes?
“Yet with tariffs American workers had the highest wages on earth.”
Wages are only part of the question. Cost of consumer goods are just as important. Tariffs also result in the reduction in quality of protected items. So, yes, wages do go up but costs go up and quality goes down.
Essentially, tariffs that are sufficiently high to ‘protect’ jobs are a tax on those who consume the protected goods in order to raise the wages of those who produce the goods. IOW, it’s the use of the government to rob some citizens to enrich others.
Kevin D. Williamson.
#1 on our "blacklist."
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