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I saw the following post on facebook and he raised points that seem to make sense to me despite my knee jerk response to oppose everything trumplestiltskin does.

Opinions?

Tariffs actually will eventually restore more better-paying jobs in the US. Already about 20,000 middle-class jobs have been restored just in the steel and aluminum industry in the US by Trump's tariffs plus the spinoff, mostly in communities that had been suffering high unemployment since free trade began.

Where was all your concern for the 15 million or so Americans who lost their jobs to free trade leaving entire regions of America economically devastated?

Yes, high tariffs aren't going to do any good for ocean port cities used to unloading all that cheap job-killing freight off ships, nor for US farmers that stole 2 million jobs from Mexican farmers, nor for any US industry that had been dependent on cheap foreign-made materials in order to hold average wages down either.

Really our non-tipped minimum wage should be over $22/hour now just to have the same average retail purchasing power that $1.60/hour had in 1968 after average 1400% retail price inflation since 1968. Our tipped minimum wage should be over $16/hour just to have parity with the 1968 $1.15/hour tipped minimum too. The main reason that US wages are so low today is because of unfair trade.

Perhaps Los Angeles can restore its lost aircraft industry and rebuild Kaiser Steel? Remember that Kaiser used to employ over 100,000 people in Los Angeles at middle-class wages just between its steel mill in Fontana and its shipyard in the Port of Los Angeles.

Take a look at Cleveland, which before free unfair trade had over 60,000 middle-class jobs just in primary metal production. Today they only have 1800 jobs in that industry left as unfair trade has stolen the other jobs. The Cleveland-area used to have a dozen car plants plus a huge locomotive and railcar manufacturing facility, plus a huge truck axle plant, Chase Brass & Copper had a big smelter, Thompson Aircraft had a big plant, plus there were thousands of smaller plants, and today more than 80% of those jobs are gone thanks to unfair trade.

No wonder that Cleveland's median home price is only $63K eh? Think that's bad, the median home price today in Detroit is only $36K, only after 75,000 abandoned houses have been torn down. In-fact there are a dozen major Southern Great Lakes manufacturing cities with the median home price below $50K, in almost all cases half or less of the median home price in those cities before free trade destroyed their economies.

The really sad part about free unfair trade is that most of these cities were Democrat strongholds before Bill Clinton flipped 180 degrees on free trade and voted with Republicans to destroy heartland America's manufacturing cities, along with 27 traitorous Democrats in the US Senate and 81 US House members too.

And you wonder why free trade-supporting coastal Democrats can't win elections? It is because you turned on heartland Democrats and badly damaged their lives. Heartland Democrats used to be about 35% of all Democrats.

Now I hear that you want to cut greenhouse gas emissions in order to save the planet, and I want to point out that shipping stuff halfway around the world just to save a buck or two on wages is producing a whole lot of greenhouse gas emissions. In fact the average large ocean container ship burns through more fuel everyday than more than one million cars do.

In-fact multiple long-range sustainability planners are calling for an end to most overseas trade as well as a localization of our urban food supply to cut down transport GHG emissions and cut down on food waste too. We will also be forced to relocalize our economies to reduce GHG emissions by 80% as just our food industry produces 25% of GHG emissions now. No more making steel in Chicago and shipping it to Colorado when we have a steel mill and iron ore in Colorado.

Yes, the excess greenhouse gas emissions caused by free trade is rapidly accelerating planetary warming along with 4.7 billion more humans than existed back in 1957 when I was born. I am only 61 and by the time I am 80 there with be another 2 billion people emitting greenhouse gases chewing their way through more and more food like a family of cockroaches, along with ever more-scarce raw materials too, some of which are already in critically-short supply.

Where does this mad rush to make some people rich end Robert? What happens when we run out of phosphate in 50-60 years and crop yields fall by half, considering that we are rapidly losing agricultural topsoil too, and already have lost 30% of the viable farmland we had globally in 1970?

By then at our present rate of greenhouse gas emission reduction our temperature across the interior US ought to be 6 C warmer than today which won't be so bad for Minneapolis but what about Phoenix and any other city where it regularly gets up to over 110 now?

Would you believe that waterfront land near the Canadian border has come well up in price recently too? Who would want to live in the middle of nowhere where it is so cold in the winter now? (People who want to have enough water supply to grow their own food while the rest of us bake).

Lucy_Fehr 8 Dec 11
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14 comments

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1

Here is more information on the "reshoring" of American jobs trend.

[marketwatch.com]

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The post can be dismissed without being finished. Anybody can rant these days. Very very little of it merits reading, much less reposting. This one earns neither.

Thanks for your condescending opinion designed to ridicule me for seeking opinions rather than commenting on the content.

@Lucy_Fehr that is not a ridicule of you, you didn't write it, right? My opinion is that the essay does not merit the space it takes. You are welcome.

@CallMeDave I took the comment about reposting it to be aimed at me.

If I am incorrect, then I apologize

@Lucy_Fehr A difference of opinion I think.

0

I appreciate how nobody has confused me with the author of the facebook post; or assumed I agreed with it or ridiculed me for soliciting opinions.

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The author claims that...

"In fact the average large ocean container ship burns through more fuel everyday than more than one million cars do."

This claim is patently false. A large container ship burns between 150 and 225 tons of fuel per day. One million automobiles burn about 7,500 tons of fuel per day, assuming average miles driven to be 60, and average mileage at 30 miles per gallon, and the weight of a gallon of gasoline or diesel fuel to be about 7.5 pounds.

I have not had time to analyze the many other claims, but I think the author's focus on trade is a bit misplaced. The most grievous injury that Trump does is to delay our total engagement with the climate issue. The uncertainty he foments holds back investment in green technology. Talk about jobs! There are many millions of potential jobs there. And the more we delay, the worse will be the effects of climate change. We need to act NOW.

That section of his post is what captured my attention although I did not believe the "million cars" number,

Thanks for the number breakdown

2

Tariffs suck - that's all bullshit. We've already lost thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to tariffs. Take soybeans, instead of selling them to China, China started buying from Brazil(?), Trump spent billions to compensate the farmers and our crops rotted in the fields or were plowed under. Even if we get that business back, China now has an alternative supplier which will drive down the price.

Keep in mind, fb is the platform of choice for the manipulation of public opinion... Don't believe what you see unless you verify it (at real news sources like NYT, Snopes, WAPO, NPR, CNN) and don't forward around things that you aren't sure are true.

4

Really that whole statement didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Canada actually already has a higher minimum wage than America. 45’s big new trade NAFTA agreement if you read it is not all that revolutionary. He just wants to make it sound good.
Tariffs are not good for America.. look at the stock market and there’s been a number of small companies that make nails, etc that have let a lot of people go.
Ford, GM, Harley Davidson are in trouble along with others. Many others are shifting more business overseas.
As noted, no economist will ever say tariffs are good for the economy. It’s been tried before, it was a huge failure.

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Yeah nah that sounds like this guy thinks manufacturing unsubstantiated conclusions from whole cloth is going to put a factory back to work. China has already found alternate sources for the crops they previously bought from us and we borrowed more money from China to bailout our own farmers that were hurt by the tarriffs we placed on china. That'll teach em. We are an economic charicature of Elmer Fudd firing his bent shotgun into his own face at the moment.

I have a hard time believing Trumps tarriffs will do anything of the sort that he claims, especially in the long term, when he's demonstrated a clear unyielding misunderstanding of the short term consequences and who he thinks pays the price for tarriffs already. These tarriffs have already cost too many batches of jobs in the 10s of thousands for me to recall the list of companies. Google "how many jobs have been lost to trumps tarriffs" and "how many jobs created by trumps tarriffs." Youll find every reputable news source in America has written articles detailing the job losses and only one random steel CEO claiming that itll eventually rebound, along with Breitbart and some similar coalition of right wingnuts claiming that we've gained 20x as many jobs as we've lost ? that would be incredible, we must be at 100% employment if thats the case. Oh not anywhere close? Cool.

Tarriffs are TAXES. The Republican business model shipped our jobs away long ago and these tarriffs will not bring them back. No matter how high the tarriff, it's not going to be enough to make manufacturing jobs in the US economically viable again when our corporations can continue manufacturing elsewhere, save their money and raise prices to cover their extra importing costs. Corporations do not pay for tarriffs any more than they pay the rest of their taxes. We, their customers, do.

The line "manufacturing unsubstantiated claims from whole cloth" was a bee-yooty. I love it.

@PolyWolf thank you thank you, here all week.

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I am a firm believer in free trade. When goods and services are swapped everyone benefits.

We need to get away from the idea that jobs ought to be created. Goods and services (wealth) needs to be created. Work is a liability, not an asset.

For social parity and human wellbeing, I think we need to adopt state capitalism.

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Carefully written collection of false arguments to support a preferred conclusion.

That's why his comment stood out; it was well written

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Eventually is not now. In my world a buck is still a dollar.

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It seems to me that a lot of the claims in this post are [citation needed]. Where is the figure coming from on 20k jobs, for example? Is that figure looking entirely at hiring in an economic sector that benefits directly from tariffs (steel) while ignoring associated job losses in sectors which are hurt by tariffs (manufacturing that depends on steel)? That's a genuine question, I don't know the answer, but I would expect the answer to require careful analysis.

Similarly, I don't think many economists agree with the claim that tariffs will "eventually" restore jobs. As an example, here's one recent study that looked at causes of manufacturing decline in the US: [bfi.uchicago.edu]

The authors write that "our results also suggest that imposing trade barriers against the rest of the world is unlikely to substantially increase the employment prospects of workers with lower levels of accumulated schooling...." (p. 63)

I believe the general consensus is that a trade war is likely to cause a small decline in GDP growth overall, and it's hard to believe that a policy which makes a negative overall contribution to the economy will increase employment. (cf. [bloomberg.com]; you can find other discussions)

You can also find thoughtful economists having discussions about policy with regard to China (e.g. between Tyler Cowen and Scott Sumner: [marginalrevolution.com] ), and in one of his Bloomberg pieces Cowen even suggested Trump deserved some modicum of credit for bringing up important issues. So it's not as if all of this is motivated strictly by partisanship. But even so, Cowen thinks Trump is essentially incompetent to really address the issues, and tariffs are not a good solution.

My understanding is basically just that the aggregate benefits of globalization to the US are too high -- despite the real downsides associated with sectors like manufacturing -- to correct them purely through economic isolation.

7

Any economist worth his/her salt would tell you that tariffs are bad for an economy. When the US puts a tariff on an item, it is a tax on the US population. It may force some to purchase things made in the US, temporarily keeping jobs in the US, but in the long term (not very long), it hurts everyone else in the US. The best policy for the US would be to have zero tariffs.

Source:

Look at some of the results: [reason.com]

6

Tariffs will hurt the poorest people the most...the ones you claim are going to get big-bucks manufacturing jobs....except shoes will cost $700 vs. $80....how high are those wages going to be? And all those abandoned factories can spring into life overnight, I guess, with no capitol outlay or retooling of any kind. Just in time for Mr. Average Worker to send his kids to college, right!?
Foolish dreams!

2

Your opinion is noted.

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