Another GOP FAIL!!! [View all]
"Trump’s trade war was a total flop
Rick Newman at Yahoo Finance
Tue, February 8, 2022
Donald Trump, the American president from 2017 to 2021, said he knew more about trade than most economists and foreign-policy experts. “Trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump famously declared in 2018. He described himself as a “Tariff Man” and proved it by imposing new tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. imports, to be paid by the American firms buying those goods.
Trump’s dubious logic was that making imports costlier to Americans would hurt the foreign sellers and give him leverage he could use to demand concessions. His biggest target, of course, was China. Trump added new tariffs on about $450 billion worth of U.S. imports from China, while China, predictably, retaliated with similar penalties on U.S. imports. The escalation rattled financial markets in 2018 and 2019 and ultimately led to the “Phase One” trade deal between the two countries, signed on Jan. 15, 2020. Under that deal, China would sharply increase its purchases of U.S. goods as a precondition for Trump (or his successor) removing the new tariffs and getting back to normal.
New trade data for 2021 shows that China came nowhere near fulfilling its commitments in the 2020 phase one deal, with U.S. exporters ending up worse off than they would have been had Trump done nothing on trade. Analysis of trade data by Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that during the first two years covered by the trade deal—2020 and 2021—China purchased just 57% of what it had committed to in the trade deal. China said it would buy at least $502 billion of U.S. goods during those two years. Yet total purchases added up to just $289 billion.
If there had been no Trump trade war, and no tariffs, U.S. exports to China would have been $119 billion more than actual levels from 2018-2021, if the U.S. share of Chinese imports had simply remained constant. That's a net loss of business for American companies. And it doesn’t include nearly $30 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds Trump doled out to farmers to compensate them for lost sales to China from 2018 through 2020."
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