Steel Trade Tariffs.

"You had voluntary import restraints under Reagan, quotas under Carter, anti-dumping (cases) under Bush 1," says Dan Ikenson, director of the libertarian Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies.

In 2002, President George W. Bush imposed tariffs on steel imports to help a struggling steel industry. A study sponsored by steel-consuming companies found that those tariffs cost 200,000 American jobs by driving up the costs for companies that buy steel and forcing them to lay off employees.

As of mid-2017, the U.S. government was imposing 149 different restrictions on steel imports.

Yet previous trade sanctions have failed to stop a steady drop in America's steel jobs. When the 2002 tariffs were imposed, for example, U.S. steel companies employed 169,000 workers. They've since lost 32,000 jobs, a 19 percent drop.

"The steel tariffs and quotas have never done much to protect the industry in the long run," says Kent Jones, an economist at Babson College and the author of "Politics vs. Economics in World Steel Trade." ''Employment in the industry has declined constantly."

The culprit might not be foreign competition. A bigger threat is technology. Allan Collard-Wexler of Duke University and Jan De Loecker of Princeton have found that steel jobs vanished because of the rise of a new technology: Super-efficient mini-mills that make steel largely from scrap metal.

My company is a scrap steel company. We deliver various types of scrap steel to the larger steel companies in our area close to our mills nationwide. My area for example would be Timken, Republic, AK, and Charter, off the top of my head. They all have their own scrap yards, and piles, we help to keep stocked. They then melt down these metals to produce their products in large ovens. Sounds simple right? Take some steel, put it in an oven and melt it down. It's by no means that simple. Each product they make takes a certain type of steel, and those products are regulated to contain certain types and amounts of steel to maintain integrity for safety for certain types of structural needs. Of the 4 I mentioned above, only Timken actually does their own recipe for their products. The other 3 make steel for other companies to buy for use. Their products go out in rolls and large bars. You see these products on flat bed trailers going down the highway. They also have to produce these products to a certain recipe for the companies buying them. In Timken's case, it's more likely the type of technology the article is talking about. The other 3 probably use a fairly simple recipe that's commonly used in a wide range of manufacturing. This is where smaller companies who make a certain product that need a material with a particular recipe can be effected most. Depending on those foreign companies that have the technology to produce that material. We haven't just lost jobs in 4 decades to trade agreements, we've fallen well behind in technology also.

[msn.com]