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The beginning of the Trump administration’s rollout of long-promised protectionist measures for the U.S. steel and aluminum industry has been Beltway comic opera as Trump’s lightly informed economic enthusiasms interact chaotically with his staff’s attempts to keep him from indulging his worst impulses too deeply.It’s not like nobody saw this coming: Trade protectionism — crony capitalism for well-connected and politically sensitive firms and industries — is bad policy, but it is one of the few issues about which Donald Trump has been consistent in his public statements going back decades, to the 1980s at least. He ran on a protectionist agenda and specifically named steel imports as a source of irritation.The economics here are pretty straightforward. Trump thinks steel is just one more example of the Chinese getting one over on Americans, but China is in fact a minor player in the U.S. steel-import business, being No. 11 among nations exporting steel to the United States. A quarter of our imported steel comes from our NAFTA partners, mostly from Canada, which provides 16 percent of U.S. steel imports. Among Asian steel exporters, South Korea is our largest trading partner, not China. Moody’s projects that the country that will be most adversely affected by the tariffs is Canada, followed by Bahrain, a country that does not loom particularly large in our economic consciousness, having as it does an annual national economic output about one-fifth of the Ford Motor Company’s. It is better to punish one’s enemies than one’s allies.And it is no good at all to punish producers and consumers both, which is what tariffs do . . .. . . The president is in error and, while he undoubtedly has the authority to impose these tariffs, doing so will put us in violation of both the letter and the spirit of our existing trade agreements. To what end? The policy will hurt more American businesses and American workers than it will help, and it will absolutely imperil export-dependent American industries from the farms to the factories. It’s a bad idea, conceived and unveiled badly.
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Topic: Steel Yourselves (Read 252 times)
