TRUMP'S TARIFF CON: IF TARIFFS DIDN'T WORK IN 1992, HOW WILL THEY WORK NOW? - Hallo friendsGOOD OF CONEX NEWS, In the article you read this time with the title TRUMP'S TARIFF CON: IF TARIFFS DIDN'T WORK IN 1992, HOW WILL THEY WORK NOW?, We have prepared this article for you to read and retrieve information therein. Hopefully the contents of postings Article health, Article news, Article sport, Article tips, Article treatment, We write this you can understand. Alright, good read.

Title : TRUMP'S TARIFF CON: IF TARIFFS DIDN'T WORK IN 1992, HOW WILL THEY WORK NOW?
link : TRUMP'S TARIFF CON: IF TARIFFS DIDN'T WORK IN 1992, HOW WILL THEY WORK NOW?

TRUMP'S TARIFF CON: IF TARIFFS DIDN'T WORK IN 1992, HOW WILL THEY WORK NOW?

I Covered Steel 26 

Years ago. Trump’s 

Solution Didn’t Work 

Then and Won’t Now.

By: Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
11 March 2018

The steel industry, shedding workers, shutting plants and bleeding red ink, pleaded with the federal government for tariffs on imports. As the government obliged, a young reporter on the steel beat for the Wall Street Journal cautioned that tariffs could “ultimately do the industry more harm than good” because the real threat to big steel wasn’t foreign competition but changing technology.

That was 1992. The administration that imposed the trade barriers was George H.W. Bush’s. And the young steel reporter was me.

Twenty-six years later, what’s old is new again. The industry’s fortunes have waxed and waned with the economy and the price of steel. Trade protections came and went. But steel jobs continue to vanish. That’s because the job loss has almost nothing to do with imports.

President Trump, playing the charlatan, is telling steelworkers he’ll protect their jobs with his 25 percent tariff, made official Thursday, on all imports but those from Canada and Mexico. “We’re going to have a lot of great jobs . . . coming back into our country,” Trump promised.

Then he yielded the lectern to Scott Sauritch, a local union president from Pennsylvania who said his father, Herman Sauritch, had been a steelworker, but “during the ’80s, he lost his job due to imports coming into this country.”

“Well,” replied Trump, “your father, Herman, is looking down. He’s very proud of you right now.”

“Oh, he’s still alive,” Scott Sauritch corrected.

Not only did Trump kill off poor Herman Sauritch, but he’s also dooming the dreams of another generation of steelworkers. The elder Sauritch probably didn’t lose his job because of foreigners. Nor do today’s steelworkers.

The United States has been a net importer of steel for six decades. It imported more than 20 percent of steel through much of the 1980s, and imports of finished steel today remain in that ballpark, about 25 percent of the market. Imports in 2017, $29.1 billion, were nearly identical to 2011’s $30.5 billion.

What has changed is that Americans consume far less steel — little more than half as much per capita compared with in the 1970s — as improved technology means automobiles and other applications require less of it. At the same time, improved steelmaking productivity means the industry requires dramatically less labor. Steel production is down by a third since the 1970s, but employment is down by about three-quarters.

These changes were well underway when I arrived in Pittsburgh in 1990 for my first job after college. At other newspapers, cub reporters might be assigned the cops beat; at the Journal, the joke went, they put you on the copper beat. I was assigned nonferrous metals and worked my way up to steel by way of machine tools and rubber.

There was still enough steel production in the area back then that when I left the windows open in my apartment, a film of black soot coated the sill. I toured the hulking industrial remains of the Monongahela Valley, and I still have over my desk a framed panorama, circa 1910, of mighty Homestead Steel Works, its furnaces blackening the sky. I visited steelworkers’ bars and wrote about the plight of a lost generation of industrial workers.

I also wrote about what was displacing them: “Minimills,” with their electric-arc furnaces that melted scrap steel, used only a third as many workers to produce a ton of steel as the old “integrated” producers, with their iron ore and coke blast furnaces.

“Big steelmakers everywhere are finding that the economies of scale that helped them prevail since Andrew Carnegie’s day no longer favor them,” I wrote in February 1993, noting that some expected Nucor, the leading minimill, to replace U.S. Steel as the nation’s largest producer by 2000.

Nucor did become the largest U.S. steelmaker, and the entire industry has become less labor-intensive. The Associated Press reported this past week that U.S. steel producers require only 1.5 person-hours to make a ton of steel, down from more than 10 in the 1980s. Electric furnaces make about 70 percent of this country’s steel, up from less than 30 percent when I covered the industry.

As a result, the radical shrinking of the steel labor force has continued despite thevarious attempts to restrict imports: voluntary agreements in the 1980s, duties in the 1990s, more tariffs in 2002. None was effective, because imports weren’t the problem.

The better answer, all along, has been for government to help steelworkers (and coal miners and other industrial workers who face a similar situation) to retrain and otherwise adapt to the inevitable.

Instead, 26 years after I first walked among the ruins of the Mon Valley, Trump continues to lie to steelworkers by telling them their jobs are coming back.

Twitter: @Milbank

NOTE:  Once again, Trump's ignorance knows no bounds.  All those old-timey, good paying, benefit rich jobs aren't being stolen by illegal immigrants but by machines.  That's right: robots!  This trend is decades old and there is no way to turn this trend back.  Trump's tariffs will only hurt the very people he says he's watching out for.   His base of highly ignorant voters who simply can't face reality. 

This whole steel and aluminum tariffs business illustrates the vacuity of Trump's "policies" probably better than any other of his "policy initiatives" save for the truly irrational and corrosive Muslim Travel Ban.  (Still, by the way in limbo after more than a year.)  In the first place, steel mills today are vastly different operations than they were back in the 1950's.  Trump, apparently, has never heard of "mini-mills" which is the basic model for today's steel production.  What's different about "mini-mills" except for being smaller?  The are automated.  Robots do the work that humans used to do.  They employ far fewer people but produce more output.  Then, as pushback against his tariffs mounted, he granted an exception to Canada and Mexico since someone - the last person he spoke to presumably - pointed out to him that steel imports from China were minuscule compared to our number one country of import, Canada.  

The whole tariffs "foreign policy cum economic rejuvenation" initiative was, if you recall Trump's campaign, striking back at China who, as Trump shouted, has been taking unfair advantage of the U.S. and dumping products on us for decades.  This may be true but they haven't been dumping under-priced steel on us, at least not directly.  What we have - once again - is a policy just like the Muslim Travel Ban that isn't based on facts.  Isn't based on data.  Isn't based on what's actually happening in the real world,  Reality, let's call it.  It's based on a falsehood or rather several falsehoods and Trump's "gut reaction" just like the unformed "gut reactions" of his base.  There is simply no other reason.  

When will this disaster that is Trump end?  

Thus Article TRUMP'S TARIFF CON: IF TARIFFS DIDN'T WORK IN 1992, HOW WILL THEY WORK NOW?

That's an article TRUMP'S TARIFF CON: IF TARIFFS DIDN'T WORK IN 1992, HOW WILL THEY WORK NOW? This time, hopefully can give benefits to all of you. well, see you in posting other articles.

You are now reading the article TRUMP'S TARIFF CON: IF TARIFFS DIDN'T WORK IN 1992, HOW WILL THEY WORK NOW? with the link address https://coneknews.blogspot.com/2018/03/trumps-tariff-con-if-tariffs-didnt-work.html

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: