1 week Ago
DONALD TRUMP ran for president of the United States under the promise of ending unfavorable trade policies that allow other countries to take advantage of this great nation’s good nature. He won with a mandate. In keeping his promise, Trump has imposed and retracted a catalogue of tariffs against trading partners ranging from Canada to China.
On April 2 – “Liberation Day” – Trump slapped a 10% universal baseline tariff on all nations and additional reciprocal tariffs on dozens of other countries. The markets reacted strongly. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged for two days, bounced back up, dipped again.
On Wednesday, Trump paused most of his tariffs for 90 days. Markets reacted again by surging back up. Uncertainty and discomfort are the consequences of unrigging the U.
S. economy. But as my liberal friends never tire of saying, “the stock market is NOT the economy.
” It’s true – Wall Street doesn’t like Trump’s tariffs. But as Trump himself said last week in his refreshingly forthright style, “I’m proud to be the president for the workers, not the outsourcers; the president who stands up for Main Street, not Wall Street; who protects the middle class, not the political class; and who defends America, not trade cheaters all over the globe.” So was Trump’s tariff saga last week a stunt, a blunder, a reversal, what? Maybe a mix of all of these.
One thing became clear through it all, however: China is the real target. Over the past three decades, the bipartisan consensus in Washington held that, as a matter of policy, America should sacrifice good-paying middle-class jobs for cheap Chinese consumer garbage. Anyone with half a brain (or heart) has sensed for a long time this tradeoff wasn’t worth it.
A stroll through Anytown, USA places the destructive consequences of this policy on depressing display. The unemployed shuffle through barren downtowns staring blankly at brand new smart phones assembled by slaves while suckling on addictive illegal Chinese vapes . Trump appears to want to decouple our economy from China’s, the second largest in the world.
Accordingly, Trump escalated his trade war with China, hiking the tariff on that country to 125%. Every other country on the planet has an economic policy built around its self-interest. One way of looking at Trump’s tariff moves is as a lesson to the world’s nations that their self-interest lies in having the U.
S. as a trading partner. And to achieve that, we need deals that favor American companies and American workers.
Wouldn’t you know it, reports emerged late last week that the White House phone lines were burning up with global trade representatives looking to form new trade deals with the U.S. The convulsive stock market aside, tariffs are good policy.
As Pat Buchanan, no stranger to the readers of this newspaper, has written , “Tariffs were the taxes that made America great. They were the taxes relied upon by the first and greatest of our early statesmen, before the coming of the globalists Woodrow Wilson and FDR.” Novel Iron Works CEO and former Congressional candidate Hollie Noveletsky attended Trump’s “Liberation Day” speech and strongly supports his economic policies.
“Change is uncomfortable, and it causes uncertainty in the market, and we are seeing this volatility right now,” she told me. “But we will come out of it stronger, we will come out with a stronger manufacturing base. We will protect the American worker, and the market will find a new equilibrium.
It’s just going to take time.” Noveletsky’s industry – fabricated structural steel – has faced unfair competition from Canada, China and Mexico. “President Trump, in my mind, is the first president who has really spoken up for our industry, the structural steel industry,” Noveletsky said.
“The greatest strength in this country is our American workers and we need to protect them.” “BE COOL,” Trump urged Americans on his platform Truth Social . “Everything is going to work out well.
The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!”.
