WP (George Will):A plan to make America 1953 again

[Riggo-toni]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-plan-to-make-america-1953-again/2016/12/28/7f3e6a54-cc4c-11e6-a87f-b917067331bb_story.html?utm_term=.ef369ca22ed3&wpisrc=nl_most-draw10&wpmm=1

 

According to a Ball State University study, of the 5.6 million manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2010, trade accounted for 13 percent of job losses and productivity improvements accounted for more than 85 percent: “Had we kept 2000-levels of productivity and applied them to 2010-levels of production, we would have required 20.9 million manufacturing workers [in 2010]. Instead, we employed only 12.1 million.” Is this regrettable? China, too, is shedding manufacturing jobs because of productivity improvements.

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Douglas A. Irwin of Dartmouth College notes that Chinese imports may have cost almost 1 million manufacturing jobs in nearly a decade, but “the normal churn of U.S. labor markets results in roughly 1.7 million layoffs every month.” He notes that there are more than 45 million Americans in poverty, “stretching every dollar they have.” The apparel industry employs 135,000 Americans. Can one really justify tariffs that increase the price of clothing for the 45 million in order to save some of the 135,000 low-wage jobs? Anyway, if tariffs target apparel imports from China, imports will surge from other low-wage developing nations.

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In 2012, Barack Obama boasted that “over a thousand Americans are working today because we stopped a surge in Chinese tires.” But this cost about $900,000 per job, paid by American purchasers of vehicles and tires. And the Peterson Institute for International Economics says that this money taken from consumers reduced their spending on other retail goods, bringing the net job loss from the job-saving tire tariffs to about 2,500. And this was before China imposed retaliatory duties on U.S. chicken parts, costing the U.S. industry $1 billion in sales. Imports of low-end tires from Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico and elsewhere largely replaced Chinese imports.

 

Full story at link.