Epoch Times on Tariffs

Posted on by johnbarleycorn12

WASHINGTON—As part of a bold shift in U.S. trade policy, President Donald Trump has ramped up tariffs on Chinese goods, aiming to revive domestic manufacturing and hold Beijing accountable for its decades of market-distorting practices. 
At the April 2 “Make America Wealthy Again” event in the White House Rose Garden, Trump unveiled the contours of his global tariff plans, including a 34 percent reciprocal levy on Beijing. The president pointed to China’s currency manipulation and other non-monetary trade barriers. 
This decision effectively raised the total new tariffs on China to 54 percent, including the 20 percent levies previously imposed to pressure Beijing into reducing the flow of fentanyl into the United States. 
This move will impact the approximately $600 billion in annual trade and bring tariffs on nearly all Chinese goods close to the 60 percent rate Trump had previously promised during his campaign. 
Trump believes that the United States holds leverage over other nations, including China, due to its status as the world’s largest and wealthiest consumer market. 
“Foreign nations will finally be asked to pay for the privilege of access to our market, the biggest market in the world,” Trump said during his Rose Garden speech. 
China quickly hit back, announcing that, starting April 10, it would impose 34 percent tariffs on imports of all U.S. goods. This move was part of a broader set of retaliatory actions, including tightening export controls on various rare earth elements and adding U.S. companies to the government’s “unreliable entities list.” 
Beijing also filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization (WTO), following through on a threat earlier this week. 
Trump pushed back at the Chinese regime after announcing its retaliatory response. 
“China played it wrong, they panicked—the one thing they cannot afford to do,” the president said in a post on social media platform Truth Social. 
Trade Distorting Practices
Despite joining the WTO in 2001, China did not evolve into the fully-fledged market economy that the United States had anticipated. 
China’s economic growth has accelerated dramatically since the country joined the WTO. However, the Chinese Communist Party’s trade-distorting practices, such as intellectual property theft, massive state subsidies, currency manipulation, wage suppression, and labor rights violations, have led to the closure of many U.S. manufacturers and the loss of millions of U.S. jobs. 
There is a bipartisan view in Washington on the need to address China’s market-distorting practices. 
Before the November election last year, President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, defended tariffs against China. 
“Previous efforts to build a China policy on changing China have not succeeded,” Sullivan said on Oct. 24. 
As a result, he argued, the United States must adopt a new set of strategies based on the current geopolitical and economic realities. 
During his first term, Trump imposed tariffs on more than $300 billion worth of Chinese goods in response to various unfair trade practices, including intellectual property theft. 
The Biden administration chose to maintain those tariffs and even announced additional tariffs on products such as electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, medical equipment, lithium-ion batteries, steel, and aluminum. 
Both administrations have used tariffs to level the playing field for domestic manufacturers and protect American workers. 
However, Trump’s latest move represents an even bolder step in attempting to contain China and hold it accountable for its longstanding trade-distorting practices. 
Nick Iacovella, executive vice president for the Coalition for a Prosperous America, an organization that represents domestic producers and workers, said that these tariffs will address the decades of deindustrialization in the United States. 
“It is incredibly important that those tariffs actually stay in place,” he told The Epoch Times. 
For decades, there has been a disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street, Iacovella added, commenting on the market reaction. 
“When automakers moved their jobs to Mexico, their stock prices went up, but car prices didn’t decrease for American consumers,” he said. 
Adam Savit, China policy director at America First Policy Institute, argues that China has less leverage, despite Beijing’s retaliatory actions. 
“The U.S. has much less exports to China than China exports to the United States. So inherently, they’re at a disadvantage,” he told The Epoch Times. 
​​He stated that charging 54 percent tariffs on Chinese goods is an appropriate response to an adversary, and it will help in the strategic decoupling from China. 
Bargaining Chip 
On April 4, Trump extended the deadline for TikTok to divest from its Beijing-based parent company by 75 days. 
The president made the announcement in a post on Truth Social, just ahead of the original April 5 deadline. 
Trump stated that he would continue working in “good faith” with China. Previously, he suggested that tariffs could be used as a bargaining chip to pressure China into approving the sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations from ByteDance, which several U.S. officials have warned has ties to the Chinese Communist Party. 
“You have a situation with TikTok where China will probably say: ‘We’ll approve a deal, but will you do something on the tariffs?’” Trump said on April 3. “We could use tariffs in order to get something in return.” 
Nathan Worcester, Jacob Burg, Terri Wu, and Andrew Moran contributed. 
Emel AkanEmel Akan 

Tucker On Tariffs

Posted on by johnbarleycorn12

Well said.

Commentary 
Does the Left Support Worker Exploitation?
It’s no secret that the stock market has reacted poorly to the Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. It makes sense why. Investors hate uncertainty, and America ushering in an entirely new economic vision, regardless of what that vision is, was always going to cause a shock. 

One of the conglomerates experiencing a nosedive is Nike. According to Schaeffer’s Investment Research, the company’s stock sank to a six-year low after the tariff announcement and now carries a 23.5% year-to-date deficit. 

The reason for this is straightforward. Nike uses cheap foreign labor to create its products, exploiting international markets to get away with paying its workforce a fraction of what American laborers would require. This is no secret. Nike reportedly employs 108,000 Chinese workers, paying them an average annual salary of $10,000. Its American employees, by contrast, tend to make nearly seven times that sum. 

This makes Washington’s new effort to incentivize companies to manufacture their products in the U.S. a bad situation for Nike. And they’re not the only ones. Reutersreported on Thursday that “Shares in Nike, Adidas, and Puma dropped sharply after Vietnam was targeted with a 46% tariff rate, Cambodia with 49%, Bangladesh with 37% and Indonesia with 32%, while Trump hiked tariffs on China by an extra 34 percentage points, following the earlier 20% tariffs.” 

Take a step back and ask yourself what this really means. A $10,000 salary is not a livable wage. It equates to less than $5 an hour, and that’s if the worker doesn’t take a single minute off all year. No vacations. No sick days. Nothing. Just a life of thanklessly slaving away in his employer’s overheated mines. 

Among other things, the White House’s pursuit of “fair trade” aims to end that inhumanity. The U.S. should not reward companies for treating human beings like soulless cogs, easily replaceable and whose hours are worth nothing more than five measly dollars.

Is that what American neoliberals want? Whether they realize it or not, Democrats complaining about the Trump tariffs are by definition advocating for the West’s continued exploitation of effective slave labor. They may attend pride parades and post social justice graphics on social media, but they quickly jump ship as soon as a policy that will drive real change threatens their precious wallets. 

Emphasizing this could be a good way for Republicans to regain the high ground in our country’s economic debate. Will the tariffs create jobs? They should. Do they put America first? Without a doubt. But they’re also moral. America is no longer interested in subsidizing the treatment of workers as worthless servants. Companies that refuse to oblige? Fine. Enjoy your big, beautiful tariff.