The real results of Trump's trade tariffs

[Zorro]

Opinion by Editorial Board

PRESIDENT TRUMP regularly blames Democrat Joe Biden for “shipping your jobs” to China, while boasting that he is bringing them back, in part by “charging China a lot of money, too, with the tariffs,” as Mr. Trump put it on Oct. 10. Any voters still inclined to credit the president’s narrative need to acquaint themselves with the latest data, which show the paltry results of Mr. Trump’s trade policies toward China.

First, some background: As of the end of 2018, Mr. Trump had launched a wave of tariffs on $370 billion worth of Chinese goods, to which China had responded with levies on $185 billion of U.S. goods. Mr. Trump bargained some of these away in a February 2020 “Phase 1” deal with China in which Beijing agreed to cut some of its tariffs and to buy $200 billion worth of specified U.S. products through 2021.

Troubling in theory, because it enshrines the idea of explicit government management of global trade flows, Mr. Trump’s deal has been a bust in practice, too. According to a recent report by Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, China has bought only 53 percent of what it should have through September 2020. Chinese imports from the United States are now lower than they were before the trade war. Some of this shortfall is, of course, due to the coronavirus-induced global downturn, and to other disasters, such as the Boeing 737 Max crashes that have hammered that company’s foreign sales, including to China. Yet much of it is due to the fact that Mr. Trump’s targets were unrealistic from the start. As Mr. Bown and other analysts noted even before the pandemic hit, U.S. producers often lacked the productive capacity to meet the deal’s targets.

The U.S. trade deficit with China now stands exactly where it did when the president took office, having risen during his first 18 months, then come back down in the wake of the tariff war. The U.S.’s global trade deficit, meanwhile, is substantially higher than it was when Mr. Trump took office. As for manufacturing, the tariffs seem to have mainly shifted jobs from industries that do not benefit from such levies to those that do, pretty much as Economics 101 predicts. A December 2019 Federal Reserve paper found that tariffs helped raise manufacturing employment by 0.3 percent in industries exposed to Chinese competition, while cutting it 1.1 percent in industries that rely in Chinese-made inputs. Meanwhile, factory jobs also suffered somewhat from China’s retaliatory tariffs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-real-results-of-trumps-trade-tariffs/2020/11/01/90f67fe0-1944-11eb-82db-60b15c874105_story.html

[modrepub]

1. And Who Fought For China's Entrance Into The WTO

Big business and the Republicans. Notice how who the Republican's blame for letting the Chinese "steal" your job.

Also note that tariffs were directed to farm aid that benefited counties that supported Trump in 2016.

https://www.cfr.org/blog/92-percent-trumps-china-tariff-proceeds-has-gone-bail-out-angry-farmers

So much Socialism (for Republicans)...

[aka-chmeee]

3. Stolen Jobs?

Yeah, stolen by American companies and shipped to China out of greed. A flood of jobs that included technology and capabilities that would have been much more difficult for China to develop on their own that it was to steal from US companies. Thanks for the now much more serious threat from the Chinese military, too.

[modrepub]

4. We've Been Guilty of That Too

The first cloth mills and open hearth steel production was lifted from Europe and lead to industrialization in New England and western Pennsylvania. It's cheaper in terms of money and people power to force industry to keep up with the times so to speak. Tariffs and restricted trade lead to WW II. Trying to keep your military the strongest instead of letting creative destruction run its course in your economy (with help for displaced workers) is probably the best course. In the long run free trade with all its worker displacement is probably cheaper than maintaining our military complex's superiority.

Germany's adoption of Nazi direction was somewhat due to the constrictive trade developed in the 1920s. Hitler's main goal was making Germany self sufficient in its food production. German collapse at the end of WW I was mainly due to the blockage of food shipments out of the Black Sea region as the Axis powers collapsed. Hitler (fighting the last war) eyed taking over Ukraine to secure Germany's food supply. In reality, if Germany had invested in its resources in agricultural development instead of developing a military complex to take Ukraine and any country opposed to it, things may have turned out better.

I fear these so called "trade wars" are going to boil into something more serious. We have a huge military complex that gets bigger every year. At some point we are going to be tempted to use it (and may regret it).

[Baked Potato]

2. Trump went after China just to have an "enemy" to deflect anger to.