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“Only a Fascist would deny facts and try to rewrite history. You can argue the merits of so called free trade. But you cannot rewrite history. The US government was funded by tariffs for 130 years. Under this stated protectionist umbrella the USA became an industrial power.”

You just can’t stop calling people names can you?

I would suggest you need to do more homework before you continue to call people names. For example, you might discover that tariffs to protect industries and jobs were extremely popular under fascist regimes like Hitler and Mussolini. That implies that you’re the fascist one.

I completely agree with the statement that the US government was funded, in the most part, by tariffs upon until the early parts of the 20th Century. You’re missing the distinction between tariffs designed to raise revenue and tariffs designed to be protectionistic. The tariffs you’re extolling were designed to produce revenue, not protect jobs.

It’s very difficult for a tariff to be both revenue producing and job protecting. A tariff high enough to protect jobs will produce little revenue since it must be high enough to severely limit trade and will, by definition, produce very limited revenue. A tariff low enough to produce revenue will be too low to protect jobs. As a conservative you should recognize that lower tax rates produce more income taxes than very high rates.

You insist upon believing that because the Tariff Act of 1789 mentioned protecting manufacturers it was protectionistic. That could be true but one would have to go beyond the preamble and examine the actual act to see if it did provide protections to industry. BTW, I provided you a citation that showed the founding fathers considered protectionistic tariffs as a part of this act but rejected them as ‘harmful to consumers’.

Just because an act makes a claim does not make it so. After all, the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act (PPACA) includes many statements. If we apply your standards, that if an act claims something it must be true, then PPACA must have improved the quality of health care, lowered the costs of health care, and extended health care to millions.

Now, lets continue to some real facts.
We currently have tariffs on imported sneakers which raised about $2.7B from American consumers in 2014. There is only one sneaker manufacturer (New Balance) in the US. New Balance is fighting efforts to remove these tariffs to “protect American jobs”. New Balance employs 1350 people. Do the math. American consumers are paying $2M per year for each job protected. Do you consider that an efficient use of funds?

FWIW, Nike says that the removal of these tariffs would allow it to introduce new manufacturing technologies that would add 10,000 new domestic jobs over ten years.

Now some say, we have a choice. We can pay the prices of tariffs or we can pay for welfare for those displaced by imports. $2M per job pays for a lot of welfare, job training, etc.

FairTraders lament the loss of manufacturing jobs. Some say we have lost 10M, 20M or more jobs. Consider the cost of ‘protecting’ 20M jobs. At $2M per job, it will cost us $40 Trillion per year. The US GDP in 2015 was $17 trillion. IOW, FairTraders would have us spend over two times the US GDP to protect jobs.

Well, you could say that we could protect jobs for only $100,000 per job per year. OK, Fine, that means we would only pay $2 Trillion per year to protect 20M jobs, approximately 12% of the US economy.

Do you see the folly of this?