Posted on December
29, 2021
Tariff Man II
Trump policy shields Biden from blame
by
Daniel
Clark
President Biden may never have tweeted "Tariffs are great!"
like his predecessor did, but that remark characterizes his policy
nonetheless. The difference is that,
unlike President Trump, whose "trade war" was used by his liberal critics to
portray him as needlessly provocative toward other nations, Biden has been
allowed to maintain and even build upon the Trump tariffs with very little
notice, let alone criticism.
About a month ago, even as Biden was touting his
party's "Build Back Better Act," he doubled the tariff on Canadian softwood
lumber, from just under 9 percent to 17.9.
This dramatic increase in the cost of importing lumber from Canada comes
at a time when lumber is already about four times as expensive as it was during
the latter half of last decade.
According to the National Association of Home Builders, the cost of
building a new single-family house has gone up by an average of $35,872 just
since last year. Does Biden think that's
not enough?
The
usual reason for the raising of tariffs is to punish another country for trade
policies that are perceived to be unfair.
The mechanism for doing so, however, is the levying of a punitive tax
against the importers and consumers of goods from that country. It is not Canada that is paying Biden's
tariff, but the importers of Canadian lumber, who will pass the expense on to
their customers. How it came to be that
a tariff can be assessed unilaterally by the president is a matter that
Congress needs to remedy. Why there
should be such an increase at a time of crisis-level inflation is a question
that Biden should have to answer.
He hasn't had to, mostly because of the hypocrisy of
conservatives who supported Trump's tariffs solely because they were his. There was very little support for tariffs on
the right side of the aisle before 2016, but once it became clear to everybody
how committed Trump was to raising them, conservative leaders across the board,
from Larry Kudlow to Rush Limbaugh, got on board. Just three weeks before being appointed
director of the National Economic Council by Trump, Kudlow wrote an op-ed
called "Tariffs Are Taxes," in which he likened tariffs to economic sanctions
imposed on our own country. Upon joining
the administration, he praised the president for his use of tariffs as a
negotiating tool, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Trump had actually
imposed them on goods not only from China, but from trading partners all over
the world. Limbaugh, a tireless
combatant against protectionist demagoguery during the 90s, did an about-face
during the Trump years, actually publishing a piece in The Limbaugh Letter
claiming that tariffs had never done anybody any harm.
Naturally,
there was plenty of hypocrisy on the Left as well. Protectionist tariffs, a longtime staple of
Democrat politics, suddenly became controversial once they were Trump's
tariffs. The liberal media actually
began explaining to people that when the president imposes tariffs, it is
American consumers who pay. On the other
side of the equation, retaliatory tariffs, especially by China, caused a
reduction in exports of American commodities, and this was actually
reported. Interviews with American
farmers who are being harmed by the trade war were commonplace.
This was as it should have been, for that was simply
an honest reporting of the news, but where is it now? Biden has done nothing to change the course
of Trump's trade war with China.
American consumers are still paying more than they should have to. American farmers are still having trouble
finding markets for their goods. Just
because a Democrat now occupies the White House, these things no longer matter.
In a way, this disparity in treatment is easy for the
media to justify, because for a Democrat to deliberately inflict economic harm
on the American people is the quintessential dog-bites-man story, being the
effect of practically everything they ever do.
"Dems intentionally hinder U.S. economy" would be about as remarkable a
headline as "Coyotes Miss Playoffs" or "Bette Midler Tweets Something Stupid." They're Democrats. Robbing the American people of the just
rewards for their labor and ingenuity is what they do.
There's no reason for the media to hold their party
accountable for its destructive policies when even their opposition declines to
press the issue. So the federal
government is deliberately ratcheting up the cost of living on the American
people through a constitutionally dubious process, which is unjustly punishing
consumers and producers alike. So what
else is new?
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