Two of my favorite daily news writers covered the same theme this morning – that Trump’s tariffs will not bring back manufacturing jobs to America. They both wrote before Trump’s announcement, late this morning, that he was pausing most of the tariffs for 90 days, causing the stock market to rebound dramatically.
Heather Cox Richardson wrote
that MAGA supporters had started to talk about tariffs as a way to Make America
Masculine Again [my phrase, not hers – the acronym MAMA won’t cut it as a manly
meme]. She quoted Rotimi Adeoye writing that the MAGA identity fetishes “rural life, manual labor, and a kind of fake
rugged masculinity”. Richardson adds
“That image – and the tradwife image that complements
it – recalls an imagined American past. In reality, the 1960s manufacturing
economy MAGA influencer appear to be celebrating depended on high rates of
unionization and taxation, and on government investing heavily in infrastructure,
including healthcare and education.”
Thom Hartmann starts his
post by describing the Trump story on how free trade destroyed the comfortable
middle class where “a single worker in an
American factory could buy a house, take a nice vacation every year, get a new
car every two or three year, put his kids through college, and retire with a
comfortable pension.” Then free trade stole 90,000 factories and 40 million
good manufacturing jobs. “To get back to
that prosperity, all we need to do is to use tariffs to force manufacturing
back to the U.S.”
But, Hartmann points
out, the factories didn’t create the middle class, the unions did. Without unions,
factories only created brutal working conditions and low wages (and wealthy
owners).
Hartmann argues that it
was a coincidence that the loss of manufacturing to other countries and the
collapse of unions happened at about the same time in the early 80s. Both were
caused by free trade and Neoliberalism which started with Reagan and continued
under every president – including Clinton and Obama – until Joe Biden.
Trump and the Republican
Party are just as opposed to unions now as Reagan was so all the tariffs in the
world are not going to return the American middle class to pre-Reagan levels.
Hartmann summarizes it this way:
The
simple reality is that bringing manufacturing back to America without
accompanying it with intense unionization won’t raise wages at all. It’s why
Honda workers in Alabama and Indiana make less than do unionized MacDonalds [sic] workers do in Denmark (who also get six weeks of annual paid vacation,
free healthcare, and free college).
This is in addition to
the fact that the way Trump is handling tariffs is unlikely to bring back any
manufacturing to America in any case. Trump applies tariffs to all countries
instead of targeting those that compete with American manufacturing with low
wages.
And Trump’s volatile on-off
approach to tariffs based on a whim indicate a lack of a long term plan (or a
plan of any kind). It takes a lot of money and time to build a factory and no
corporation will undertake such a project based on today’s tariffs which may
not be in place 5 or ten years from now (or, as we have just seen, 5 or 10
hours). Wise investors will do nothing (except temporarily shut down current
operations in America) as long as Trump is in the White House.
Senator Bernie Sanders
made those points in a news release today:
… I understand that we need trade
policies that benefit American workers, not just large corporations. Targeted
tariffs can be a powerful tool to stop corporations from outsourcing American
jobs. They can help level the playing field for American autoworkers or
steelworkers to compete fairly against companies who have moved production to
countries where they can pay starvation wages.
But Trump’s chaotic across-the-board tariffs are not the
way to do it.
Imposing steep tariffs on countries like Germany or
France will not bring jobs back to America. These are not low-wage countries.
Corporations are not shutting down plants in America and moving them to
Switzerland. Trump’s blanket tariffs will just raise prices for American consumers
and hurt our relationships with allies, undermining our global position.
Trump’s trade chaos – changing policy from day to day –
is rapidly undermining our economy and making it impossible for households and
small businesses to function. How can you plan for next week, let alone next
year, when the rules might change tomorrow?
… Enough is enough. We
need a coherent trade policy that puts working people first.
Sources:
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-8-2025
https://hartmannreport.com/p/trumps-factory-fantasy-the-middle-71f
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-statement-on-trump-tariff-announcement/
No comments:
Post a Comment