{"id":8732,"date":"2018-03-07T15:04:48","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T21:04:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=8732"},"modified":"2018-03-07T15:04:48","modified_gmt":"2018-03-07T21:04:48","slug":"words-trumps-tariffs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/03\/words-trumps-tariffs.html","title":{"rendered":"A few words on Trump’s tariffs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

$\"\"$ <\/p>\n

Readers will recall that I am the proud(ish) owner of a new minivan<\/a> \u2014 and with that, the free trial subscription to sattilite radio, and the yes-I\u2019m-a-Gen-Xer 80s on 8 channel, on which the Billy Joel song Allentown made an appearance earlier today while I was running errands.<\/p>\n

<\/iframe><\/p>\nTo be honest, I don\u2019t remember this music video, just the song itself.\u00a0 I suspect that this predated the installation of cable TV in our home, when we were limited to the music videos that were aired on channel 62 for an hour in the afternoon.<\/p>\nBut the song still makes me a bit weepy, at least when I\u2019m in that sort of mood.\u00a0 It was released in 1982, when the newspapers were full of reports of factories closing.\u00a0 That was the year that Vincent Chin was murdered by two men who thought he was Japanese.\u00a0 It was a time when, in my Dad\u2019s telling, autoworkers would think twice before parking a Japanese car in the company parking lot \u2014 that is, if they didn\u2019t want their taillights smashed in.\u00a0 And it was a time when, depending on the telling, the UAW protected its employees despite their indifference to quality on the assembly line (\u201cdon\u2019t buy a car made on a Monday or a Friday\u201d), and demanded such high pay increases that the company couldn\u2019t invest in improvements, or in which management was indifferent to any such improvements.<\/p>\nRemember when Obama mocked Romney:\u00a0 \u201cthe 80s called\u201d?<\/p>\nTrump\u2019s steel and aluminum tariffs have a bit of a time warp feel, as if he\u2019s been transported to the 80s \u2014 or perhaps, as if, in the 80s, he had pledged that someday he would do something about these dastardly foreigners undercutting American steel.<\/p>\nEveryone\u2019s throwing out all kinds of logical arguments about how much of a mistake a trade war would be, and that\u2019s great, but Trump\u2019s decision is coming from an emotional reaction, something straight out of the 1980s, not out of a considered logical analysis of the 2018 economy.<\/p>\nIt reminds me a bit of Obama\u2019s statement on capital gains:\u00a0 when told that increasing capital gains taxes would ironically reduce revenues and would increase taxes, not just on the wealthy, but on middle-class savers, he conceded the point but <a href=\"https:\/\/taxfoundation.org\/obama-and-gibson-capital-gains-tax-exchange\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">nonetheless said<\/a>, \u201cI would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.\u201d\u00a0 It was a statement that was coming out of an emotion, the desire for fairness, not from any serious study of economics.<\/p>\nAnd that same \u201cit\u2019s unfair\u201d appears when we think of trade \u2014 we Americans lower our trade barriers, but China doesn\u2019t play fair in protection of intellectual property, allowing American firms into Chinese markets, and the like.\u00a0 We believe that the market should determine winners and losers; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/08\/from-the-library-the-birth-of-korean-cool-by-euny-hong.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">Korea\u2019s government made the decision<\/a> to build K-pop into an \u201cexport\u201d and succeeded spectacularly, for example, and in China the government has been heavily involved in building up their export industries.<\/p>\nAfter I started drafting this post, Megan McArdle <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/the-real-risk-to-trumps-tariffs-american-jobs\/2018\/03\/06\/5ec6242e-2191-11e8-86f6-54bfff693d2b_story.html?utm_term=.af13466f2b97\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">provided her own reflection<\/a> on the prospective trade war:<\/p>\n<blockquote>Free-traders have a tendency to get too fixated on the consumer benefits of trade. When restrictionists accuse foreign companies of selling us artificially cheap goods, free-traders retort that you don\u2019t complain when a manufacturer wants to sell you goods below cost; you snap up those bargains. But politically, this argument has its limits. For free-traders have missed something important: People care much more about their roles as producers than consumers.<\/p>\nThe United States has long been seen as a nation of empty consumerism, with Americans deriving status from how much they can stuff into their oversize homes. But that\u2019s wrong; in fact, Americans are a nation of workers. Foreigners often remark that the first question any American asks you upon meeting is \u201cWhat do you do?\u201d Our jobs are our identities. And people will do a lot more to protect their identity than they will to get 20 percent off a new washing machine.<\/p>\nThe correct message, then, is not lyrical rhapsodies about how marvelous it is that we\u2019re pulling so many Chinese peasants out of poverty. It\u2019s that trade wars cost jobs, good American jobs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nTrump\u2019s Trade War is intended to protect jobs; his opponents say this\u2019ll backfire.\u00a0 But there is a growing acknowledgement that free trade has cost Americans jobs (e.g., <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/02\/immigration-absolved-job-stealing.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">this report from last week<\/a>), and I\u2019m not seeing any good answer to this problem.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\nImage:\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File%3ASteelMill_interior.jpg; By Payton Chung from DC, USA (Fiery Finkl Forging) [CC BY 2.0 (http:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Readers will recall that I am the proud(ish) owner of a new minivan \u2014 and with that, the free trial subscription to sattilite radio, and the yes-I\u2019m-a-Gen-Xer 80s on 8 channel, on which the Billy Joel song Allentown made an appearance earlier today while I was running errands. Here it is, readers. To be honest, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[923,336,926],"class_list":["post-8732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-free-trade","tag-protectionism","tag-tariffs"],"yoast_head":"\n<title>A few words on Trump's tariffs<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Readers will recall that I am the proud(ish) owner of a new minivan -- and with that, the free trial subscription to sattilite radio, and the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/03\/words-trumps-tariffs.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" 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