Trump's Tariffs: Why Such a Half-Baked Policy?

The problem with Trump is an incapacity to act to any effect. He hasn't even built the goddam wall, or stopped the flood of illegal immigrants by other means.

Now Trump is imposing tariffs on China to punish China for stealing American industrial and military secrets, which obviously, won't stop China stealing American industrial and military secrets.

Why not?

Because the US is in an informational, technological and economic war with China for global supremacy. China ain't gonna give up just because Trump bans Huiwei phone gear, or sticks a tariff on imports of Chinese-made Christmas tree lights.

The only consequence of Trump's anti-China tariffs, if they stay, is to force global corporations in search of cheap labor, to move off-shore production from China to Bangladesh, Vietnam or a dozen other places. Meantime, the Chinese will have more Christmas tree lights for their own consumption. So who cares? What difference does it make?

If Trump actually wanted to rebuild America's industrial base, he should impose a tariff wall against every one, with the exception of Canada, Mexico, and the rest of Latin America: the condition being, of course, that those countries free to export to America tariff-free enter the same tariff ring-fence as America.

That way, US labor would be competing not with billions of low wage workers, but a manageable 400 million Latin Americans. Moreover, those Latin American competitors would have an incentive to purchase high-tech gear tariff-free from the US, rather than China or elsewhere beyond the tariff ring fence. A further benefit would be to raise the prosperity of Latin America, thereby reducing the inclination of millions of Latin Americans to migrate to North America.

Two other requirements for a sound US industrial policy are:

1. Anti-monopoly legislation that creates fierce competition within the protected Western Hemisphere market;

2. Negotiation with other high wage countries, including Japan, S. Korea, Australia, and the European nations, to bring them within the tariff protected trade zone.

None of this will get done, obviously. Instead, it looks as though we may be about to see the Mother-of-all wars for global hegemony against Iran.

Yes, Tariffs Raise Domestic Prices, That's the Reason for Them

BePo, the Bezos Post, aka the Washington Post, reported on Monday that:

National Economic Council Director Lawrence Kudlow acknowledged Sunday that American consumers end up paying for the administration's tariffs on Chinese imports, contradicting President Trump's repeated inaccurate claim that the Chinese foot the bill.

Which is a truth stated with intent to deceive.

Yes, tariffs raise the price of imported goods, which is bad. But tariffs boost domestic production of import substitutes, thus raising the demand for labor, hence raising wages, thus enabling Americans to pay higher prices for locally produced goods. 

Moreover, the substitution of domestic products for many of the half-trillion-dollars-worth of goods the US currently imports from China will greatly increase domestic demand for the materials and machines necessary to expand American manufacturing. This, in turn, will stimulate investment in all kinds of R and D and in technical education. 

Who loses from tariffs?

The globalist elite, who seek relentlessly to maximize profits by manufacturing where wages are lowest and environmental and workplace health and safety regulations are weakest, while selling where prices are highest, and taking profits where taxes are lowest or non-existent. 

That's why MAGA is such an incendiary idea. Globalists don't want to make American industry great again or Americans prosperous again. They want to make Americans poor — dirt poor, like the teeming masses of Third Worlders with whom they are striving mightily to flood both the United States and Europe, thereby to drive down wages.

And that's why the globalist elite deploy leftist puppets to accuse of racism, those who oppose their own impoverishment through invasion of their homeland by people of alien race, religion and culture.

Related:
CNS: Patrick Buchanan, Tariffs -- The Taxes That Made America Great

Globalist Economics No. 37: Raising the Minimum Wage, or How to Make Water Flow Uphill

Western liberals hate it when it's pointed out that their globalist policies create poverty in the developed nations by putting the Western workforce in direct competition with the billions of poverty-stricken workers of the Third World: from Bangladeshi garment-industry workers employed in collapsible factories for pennies and hour, to Chinese electronics assemblers employed in factories with anti-suicide nets, and Indian IT technicians earning in a year what a similarly qualified American or European might earn in a month.

So what to do?

Raise Western wages by fiat. Legislate a higher minimum wage.* Easy, hey! And sure to win the hearts and minds of every economically illiterate voter, which is to say most people.

What, after all, could go wrong in ordering greedy, fat-cat employers like Donald Trump to pay their workers more?