Just Politics

[jbsliverer]

How Trump’s Tariffs Really Affected the U.S. Job Market
https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/83746
MICHAEL PETTIS
A recent study on U.S.-China trade concludes that Trump’s trade policies cost the U.S. economy nearly a quarter million jobs. But its obsolete understanding of trade flows ends up pointing trade policymakers in the wrong direction.
January 28, 2021

AJanuary 2021 study commissioned by the U.S.-China Business Council (USCBC) claims that former president Donald Trump’s trade policies cost the United States 245,000 jobs. As a Reuters news report put it, the USCBC claimed that “a gradual scaling back of tariffs” could help stop the bleeding, while also arguing that a failure to do so would lead to even greater job losses and more sluggish growth.

But while I have long argued that Trump’s approach to trade harmed the U.S. economy more than it helped, this is mainly because these trade policies were based on obsolete ideas about how trade works and because they ignored the fundamental sources of the U.S. trade imbalances. As Matthew Klein and I argued in Trade Wars are Class Wars, bilateral tariffs on Chinese goods do nothing to change the income distortions in China that spurred the country to run huge surpluses and export its deficient levels of domestic demand. Nor do such tariffs address the mechanisms that send these demand deficiencies to American shores. As a result, even if Trump’s tariffs were to succeed in reducing the U.S. bilateral deficit with China, they would simply cause the U.S. deficit with the rest of the world, along with China’s surplus with the rest of the world, to rise by at least as much.

Clearly, the Trump administration’s trade policies were not successful. American deficits with China and the rest of the world were higher last year than they had been in over a decade. And while it is a little unfair to consider 2020 data without recognizing the peculiar economic distortions created by the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. trade and current account deficits were much higher during Trump’s presidency than they had been under former president Barack Obama....................................................................

Lumber Affordability Hitting Homebuilders After Trump Tariff
Homebuilders' confidence waned in July as lumber prices rise in the aftermath of a Trump-implemented tariff.
https://www.usnews.com/news/economy/articles/2017-07-18/lumber-affordability-hitting-homebuilders-after-trump-tariff
By Andrew Soergel
July 18, 2017, at 4:06 p.m.

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