One of the first things Dub-Yuh did as president was to impose tariffs on steel imports. The U.S. steel industry has claimed to deserve “infant industry” protection with tariffs and quotas for at least the past 160 years. Some people never grow up. Trump has followed suit with tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which will increase the price of everything made of steel and aluminum (i.e., American-made cars), rendering vast portions of the U.S. economy less competitive in international competition. Thousands of American workers will lose their jobs as a result. It will also loot the pocketbooks of American purchasers of American-made goods that contain steel and aluminum, i.e., Trump’s working-class political base, with higher prices. Other countries will retaliate with high tariffs on American-made goods, causing even more unemployment among Trump voters in the export-related industries. Trump just shot himself in the foot with a bazooka.
The beneficiaries will be the Crooked Hillarys of American industry — the sleazy, corrupt, plunder-seeking steel and aluminum corporations and their unions. There is nothing more anti-populist than that, which has now become the defining economic policy of this supposedly “populist” president. What a joke. If Trump is an “economic populist” then I’m the pope.
I explained this thirty years ago in an article that was eventually reprinted in Readers Digest, which at the time had some 30 million readers around the world in several languages.
7:04 pm on March 3, 2018
