ICYMI: Politicians believe tariffs will revive a lost era of American manufacturing. But they won’t improve people’s everyday lives
Donald Trump appears to be testing the boundaries of the power he can accumulate and then exert upon his allies, with a singular ambition: to coerce them into submitting to US supremacy. Though the president temporarily walked back his threat to unleash severe universal tariffs on Mexico and Canada, he has since imposed 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminium imports, which will primarily hit Canada, Mexico and China, and has announced a new plan for “reciprocal tariffs” on American trading partners. Above all, he clearly intends to wage a trade war against China. His brash, bombastic and belligerent threats reflect the reactionary political energy that drove his rise, which feeds on displays of dominance and disruption. His trade war won’t work to restore US economic dominance – but it tells us a lot about how both sides of the political aisle blame the US’s economic precarity on China’s economic ascent.
Over the past decade both Democrats and Republicans have blamed growing economic discontent on the sharp decline of American industry. The share of the US workforce employed in manufacturing has been in decline since the 1950s: today, just over 8% of American workers are employed in manufacturing, compared with 32% in 1953. The postwar era holds a powerful resonance for both the right and the left, and is often romanticised as a period when unionised male breadwinners in the industrial working class enjoyed far greater economic stability and prosperity than working and middle-class people do today. Viewed through this prism, since the decline of US manufacturing has occurred at the same time that China has emerged as a global manufacturing powerhouse, China’s gains equate to the US’s – and its workers’ – losses.
Melanie Brusseler is a political economist and the US programme director at the thinktank Common Wealth
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