Trump's China Tariffs Will Succeed

For the last four decades, the United States has often engaged in trading away its future by running up debt and selling assets instead of products. This brought about the stagnant living standards and incomes experienced by the U.S. middle class during the presidencies preceding Trump.

The countries with which the U.S. had the largest trade deficits (goods and services) in 2018 were:

1. China - $379 billion
2. Mexico - $78 billion
3. Germany - $67 billion
4. Japan - $58 billion.

These countries accounted for 93% of the total, with China, by itself, accounting for 61% of the U.S. trade deficit. Donald Trump was elected by the people who have borne the brunt of this policy failure, with a mandate to fix it.

On Friday, President Donald Trump took a huge step toward doing just that. He raised the U.S. tariff rate from 10% to 25% on $200 billion per year worth of Chinese goods that were being imported into the United States. Back in July, when Trump had initially imposed the 10% tariffs on Chinese imports, China responded by imposing tariffs on $110 billion of U.S. exports to China.

Trump also threatened to place tariffs on the other Chinese goods being imported each year into the United States. This gives the U.S. leverage that China can’t match. As a result of its mercantilist strategy, China exported $540 billion worth of goods to the U.S. but only let $121 billion worth of U.S. goods into China in 2018. (Mercantilism is the “beggar-thy-neighbor” economic strategy of maximizing exports and minimizing imports in order to grow at one’s trading partners’ expense.)

China has been engaged in economic warfare against the U.S. for decades. China leverages all available means to achieve its mercantilist ends -- from manipulation of its currency, to tariffs, to non-tariff barriers, to forced technology transfer, to outright stealing of technology.

The negative consequences of China’s trade policies have hit many parts of the United States and many regions of the U.S. economy. Innovation, marriage, health, and welfare suffered as a result of what economists term the China shock.

The massive trade surpluses accumulated by China have reflected and catalyzed the massive transfer of technological and manufacturing capacity from the free world to China's censored, repressed, firewalled, and very much unfree...



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