Pat Buchanan was correct all along:
If you choose not to purchase Chinese goods and instead buy comparable goods made in other nations or the USA, then you do not pay the tariff. China loses the sale. This is why Beijing, which runs $350 billion to $400 billion in annual trade surpluses at our expense is howling loudest. Should Donald Trump impose that 25{078d2fa92d2710998490ec6979ca31630e0fb1e1550511b9ab87370364231a3d} tariff on all $500 billion in Chinese exports to the USA, it would cripple China’s economy. Factories seeking assured access to the U.S. market would flee in panic from the Middle Kingdom.
Tariffs were the taxes that made America great. They were the taxes relied upon by the first and greatest of our early statesmen, before the coming of the globalists Woodrow Wilson and FDR.
Tariffs, to protect manufacturers and jobs, were the Republican Party’s path to power and prosperity in the 19th and 20th centuries, before the rise of the Rockefeller Eastern liberal establishment and its embrace of the British-bred heresy of unfettered free trade.
The Tariff Act of 1789 was enacted with the declared purpose, “the encouragement and protection of manufactures.” It was the second act passed by the first Congress led by Speaker James Madison. It was crafted by Alexander Hamilton and signed by President Washington.
After the War of 1812, President Madison, backed by Henry Clay and John Calhoun and ex-Presidents Jefferson and Adams, enacted the Tariff of 1816 to price British textiles out of competition, so Americans would build the new factories and capture the booming U.S. market. It worked.
Tariffs financed Mr. Lincoln’s War. The Tariff of 1890 bears the name of Ohio Congressman and future President William McKinley, who said that a foreign manufacturer “has no right or claim to equality with our own. … He pays no taxes. He performs no civil duties.”
That is economic patriotism, putting America and Americans first.
Anyone who claims that free trade is good for America is either a) lying, b) does not understand economics, or c) both. I pointed out when this US-China trade dispute began that any so-called trade war would be good for the US economy because imports (M) are an intrinsic statistical drag on the economy.
Do the math. Since GDP = C+I+G + (X-M), does GDP grow or contract when M gets smaller?
And on the logical side, if Chinese imports are so good for America and its workers, then why is China shrieking in outrage over mere prospect that it will not be able to export as much to the USA in the future?
Then there is the key question asked by Mr. Buchanan: What great nation did free traders ever build?