1 week Ago
A tariff is a tax. It is a tax imposed by Government on goods imported into, and occasionally exported from, a country. In order to bypass the Congress, the authority constitutionally charged to impose taxes, Trump has invoked the National Emergencies Act, which allows him to declare an emergency with nothing more than a signature on his executive order.
But what is the national emergency? Here is Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s White House Press Secretary: “This is a National Emergency. We have a $1.2 trillion trade deficit.
We’ve had 90,000 factories closed across our Heartland. We’ve had five million manufacturing jobs go overseas since 1997. And President Trump is finally doing something about it by implementing these reciprocal tariffs.
It’s the golden rule for the Golden Age of America. As for prices and what the American public can expect. They can expect price stability.
They can expect to buy American. It’s a patriotic thing to do.” Let us examine Leavitt’s AI recital: Trump’s National Emergency.
The US Congress National Emergency Act (1976) gives powers to the President to invoke a national emergency. But it provides no clear definition of what constitutes a national emergency. However, a Special Committee of the 94th Congress (1975-1977), attached its own qualifications to the President’s powers: A President must invoke such powers if it, “is essential to the preservation, protection, and defence of the Constitution, and is essential to the common defence, safety, or well-being of the territory and people of the United States.
..” Does Trump, a firm constitutionalist, really believe that the framers of the Act intended for his tariff regime to be essential to the “preservation, protection, and defence of the Constitution”, to the “common defence, safety or well-being of the territory and people of the US”? Hardly.
This tariff by emergency powers and executive signature is really a gimmick, a contrivance, for Trump to wield his way. A $1.2 Trillion Dollar Trade Deficit.
Assuming that these figures are correct, who is to blame for this deficit? Trump has imposed a 54% tariff on Chinese goods. China produces cheaper. Even high-quality modern edge goods: electric vehicles, AI apps, zero-carbon energy systems, battery supply chains, fourth-generation nuclear systems, advanced shipping, its Belt and Road Initiative.
The China-US trade deficit exists because US consumers choose to buy China. In preference to Made in America. The asymmetry is in skills, creativity, genius, the superiority of the Chinese manufacturing ecology.
Tariffs will not solve these basic US challenges; or the US consumer’s freedom to choose. Ninety thousand Factories Closed Across Our Heartland. America, and Europe, simply cannot compete.
Think of low labour prices, high manufacturing density, billions of literate and employable youth in China, South-East Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam), Japan, India, Brazil. The bourgeois manufactory has become pandemic. Pandora has escaped her box.
No tariff regime, big-stick bullying, no gunboat diplomacy, no Opium War (British/US wars vs China in the mid-19th Century to bully the Emperor to open up China to their goods) could stop this. The US is struggling to compete in the current populous, multipolar global trade regime. It is hankering after its old dominance.
Job Losses. Leavitt posits that, since 1997, five million jobs that were done in the US are now being done overseas. It is not clear where Leavitt got this data.
The US Bureau of Labour Statistics does not keep stats for US jobs that have migrated overseas. However, US job losses due to overseas outsourcing, or expatriate worker migration, are entirely voluntary. Many US jobs, like elsewhere, have been lost to AI, Machine Learning, and Robotics.
Reciprocal Tariffs. Are these tariffs really reciprocal? Has the US studied the particulars of its trade balance with each country targeted? Okay, so I am bagging toolum, pholourie, tamarind balls and exporting to the US. Why are my goods being tariffed again? Because the US toolum, pholourie and tamarind balls factories have shut down? Because we have a running trade deficit in these products with the US? Because my competitive edge in these products constitutes threats to the US Constitution, to the common defence and safety of the US? As far as I am able to empirically fathom, Trinidad and Tobago has a trade balance deficit with the US, overwhelmingly in favour of the latter.
So why am I being taxed 10% on my exports into the US again? Trinidad and Tobago mistook the economic and administrative assets the proverbial White Man left here for us by the White Man himself. And we mashed them up. The train, the institutes of the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, the orchards, farms, dairies.
The agrarian system. Caroni (1975) Ltd, Texaco/the refinery at Petrotrin. And the systems of criminal justice, town planning, the public service.
These systems were not built to give us dominance, but to keep us subservient. But, they were British-built, hardy, sound, productive; before World War Two, the British never expected to leave them behind. Instead of building on them, transforming where necessary, we crushed them.
Trinidad and Tobago mistook the persons who replaced the proverbial White Man in 1962. We mistook them for real representatives of our cause. Instead, they represent the cause of the historical elites and donor classes.
They have de-diversified our economy in favour of these classes. Our flexibility to trade with the world beyond America, beat the Trump tariffs sanction, is hardly more than feeble..
