Why didn’t President Biden get rid of the tariffs Trump put on Chinese made stuff that many people say have been bad for the U.S. economy? Increasing those tariffs has been a big talking point for Trump lately. How does Harris argue against them?
Part of it is that China slapped a bunch of retaliatory tariffs on US exports, and those tariffs also still exist. Biden could remove the US tariffs unilaterally, but he can’t control what China does. He’d be putting the US in a compromised position relative to China just when he was trying to improve the US economy.
This is one of those “Easy to break, hard to fix” problems that screw over the sensible party every time. Even if Biden were to try to negotiate a mutual elimination of tariffs with China, China knows there’s a good chance Trump will win again, and toss the whole agreement out, as he did with several treaties his first time around. Why would China compromise with Biden when they have a reasonable expectation that Trump will just fuck things up again? Tariffs aren’t great, but uncertainly is worse.
Seems to me that with inflation being high in the past few years, eliminating most or all tariffs would have been a way to reduce customer price-pain.
Yeah, but it also feeds directly in to the “Biden betrayed America for his Chinese business partners!” narrative. Like it or not, stupid politics matters. Biden had a hard enough time getting everything else done, he didn’t need to hand the MAGAs a custom-made club to beat him with. Such a narrative could have derailed a lot of what he did accomplish.
Why has President Biden left all the Trump tarrifs in place 4 years later? Are they still needed?
This is going to veer into GD territory pretty soon, but my guess is that, for various political reasons (mostly to please domestic interests which benefit from being protected from foreign competition), the Biden administration found these tariffs to be convenient; at the same time, they know tariffs are unpopular among consumers and economists, so keeping them in place without talking too much about them gives them the best of both worlds: Having the tariffs while also avoiding the blame for introducing them.
I understand so if mods think it best so be it.
I just think that if tarrifs are taxes, Biden-Harris are taxing the middle class and others just as much as Trump.
Supposedly because China didn’t hold up their end of the deal.
But, this is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
But, IMHO, it was by far the biggest mistake of his presidency.
[Moderating]
@Clu-Me-In , this question is inherently political, not factual. Since @2_More_Bits started a similar thread to yours a few hours before you, in the proper forum, I’ve merged your thread into it.
I can’t read Biden’s mind so this is purely speculative but I’d say that there’s two top reasons:
First -
Detaching from China is good. They’re threatening their surrounding countries, have been working to generate a new Cold War by promoting pro-authoritarian propaganda and debate across the globe, plausibly committing genocide against the Uighurs, harassing Chinese people who live abroad, etc.
The better way to do that would have been something like the TPP. We start building more redundancy into our supply chain so that, eventually, we can detach without any major repercussions. But, having decided to go the short and stupid way where you just have to soak up the pain, you may as well stick it out.
As a comparison, maybe you want to go visit that cool new restaurant down the hill. Climbing down the hill will mostly be a process of falling and hurting yourself, pushing through prickly plants, etc. But, it’s also the fastest. The alternative method is that you get in the car, drive a couple miles north, along a windy path, merge onto the main road, and drive most of the way back. Through that, you’ll have A/C, radio, a nice scenic drive, etc. but it’s going to take 4 times longer.
Once you’re already half way down the hill, it’s just not worth climbing back up to get back in the car.
Second -
Both Trump and Biden are, fundamentally, old school Democrats with a love of labor. Trump came more from the Dixiecrat side of things (the group who jettisoned off for Nixon to the Republican party and has, since, taken things over) where Biden came more from the Rust Belt Labor movement side, but that’s basically the sum of it. Both of them, fundamentally, think that Made in USA is amazing and that if there aren’t factory jobs then, clearly, we must be deep in unemployment (whether that’s true or not).
Harris has said that she won’t be a “worker protection” Democrat. Basically, she’ll take a 1980s-2010s Republican view of keeping the economy running. What that actually means, in practice and if she actually does it, remains to be seen. Maybe that means loosening the tariffs. Maybe it doesn’t (e.g. because of reason 1, above). We’ll have to see.
I question that she ever said she is against “worker protection.”
In 2019 she said ”I’m not a protectionist Democrat.” That is different. It means she would want to protect workers with tools other than tariffs, including unions, and retraining when jobs are lost.
Trump — and maybe Xi — has probably pushed the Overton Window on tariffs to where Democrats have to be a bit more friendly to tariffs than they used to be.
I’m not aware of a protectionism that isn’t worker protectionism, in American politics?
As for the inflation aspect - the biggest complaint right now seems to be groceries, and not a lot of that comes from China.
The main thing is - for some products, China is deliberately undercutting manufacturers. there’s a whole debate about how legitimate this is - how wages there are kept low, if the Yuan is deliberately kept at a low exchange rate, etc. However, for economic and global security reasons it’s a good idea to encourage some level of producton for some more cirtical local industries.
Plus, as mentioned, there’s no great upside to be seen removing something that gives American industry and American jobs a financial advantage. The grievances about Chinese anti-competitive practices are still real.
The downside is of course that tariffs are a cushion - a 10% tariff just means local competitors now can price 10% more and still be competitive. Industries become complacent, and eventually the foreign industries can compete even at 10% or 20% price disadvantage.
(A classic example is garment making. While cars can be assembled to a greater extent by robots using fewer people, generally garments have to be sewn by hand. A worker can only push a cloth through a sewing maching so fast, whether they make $10 an hour or $10 a week, so first world workers are at a severe disadvantage. If someone can heavily automate garment making, maybe America will be great again at making clothing.)
Wouldn’t that be stricter labour standards and support for unions?
That would be protection for workers unconnected to tariffs.
I have ancestors for whom the textile mills and clothing industry of South Carolina was a definite step up from their parents and grandparents who were mostly sharecroppers. And of course that was a move for cheaper labor from the northern part of the country. I’m not sure any amount of automation can bring back such an industry when people are cheaper.
Yes, the TPP would have worked to isolate China. But everything I always saw about it meant that I expected more losses of American jobs while industries like Hollywood got absolutely massive anti-consumer IP protection.
Yes, Canada too used to have significant tariffs on foreign clothing and shoes to protect local industry. That still did not keep the foreign manufacturers out, it simply raised the price for everyone here.
Interesting. I did not realize TPP excluded China at the time, I would have thought it would be a major participant. I do recall the complaints about Hollywood and IP. (I see Kim Dot Com is finally about to be extradited to the USA, so there is still some life in the controversy).
Every tariff regime has to balance the cost to consumers and the need to protect local industries. The textile industry is a good example of one that cannot easily compete. On the one hand is the arguement over what is a fair wage in each country, workers’ rights to organize, etc. However, apparently today clothing is made in Vietnam, Baladesh, Mynamar, etc. because to a great extent Chinese workers have priced themselves out of the market.
I see industrial development as a wave spreading out from the developed countries. Once upon a time, the big industries - steel, cars, etc. - were North American and Eurpoean. As more countries became sufficiently industrialized, they too could compete. Japan became a car manufacturer. Then South Korea. Now China is getting into the mix. The wave of clothing manufacturing has spread to the edges of the world.
And this is why, no mater what, it is better to have Biden in charge of figuring it out, and will be better to have Harris in charge in the future, because we all know that Trump is incapable of understanding such complexities.
We can debate the question of whether or not he “really believes” that China is paying these tariffs, but what isn’t really debatable is that Trump views this very simplistically: Tariffs Solve Everything. He’s not going to worry about nuanced balance, or the tertiary effects of placing tariffs on certain goods. He’s just going to add them wherever he feels like adding them, nuance be damned.
The Hollywood changes slipped past me. I’d gather that they started as an initiative to get Pacific nations to crack down on film piracy in their region in return for gaining more work from the US and Canada (which makes sense and I’m fine with) but, it looks like, that section got expanded outside of the limit of what makes sense for an international agreement to stuff that seems to just be US domestic law.
But, in terms of “losing jobs”, that’s nonsense; all the jobs went away in the 70s. If you look at the division of labor in the US, by industry, over the last century, manufacturing and other jobs that could be off-shored all did so decades before Ross Perot warned about a “giant sucking sound” of jobs going abroad. With foreign workers costing 1/30th the price of an American, as soon as one American executive discovered that they could make stuff cheap and ship it to the US, international agreements be damned, manufacturing is going global. That’s just an immense gravitational force away from the US for any off-shorable task. All that things like NAFTA and Most Favored Nation accomplish is to direct the focus of that pressure.
As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, you would need to set tariffs at 900% to make up the difference in labor cost between the US and China, if you really wanted to impact our domestic labor market. When that’s true, the TPP is effectively irrelevant to US workers. They just have to work in air conditioned offices, whether they want to or not. No sweaty, dangerous work conditions for them. But, we do get to decide which countries get most of the money. The TPP can help with that.
The economics has been handled above, but I’ll take a pure political stab at it. Part of my answer is believing Trump previously did something Harris does not or no longer minds, and that is delicate to handle.
While it’s bad for the general US economy, it can be good for getting votes in specific places. Very generally, lots of towns in the US specialize in say making steel (the steel plant employs half the town, etc - likely in battleground States). Tariffs allow you to say you’re going to save those manufacturing jobs (in theory it does, not clear about reality).
Trump shifted how we’ve thought about and used tariffs after decades of pro-Free Trade, just did it, and put them out there - for better or worse. It’s hard to undo. Biden in 2020 campaigned that he’d undo them…but he did not. It’s vaguely like Obamacare, while pretty recent, it’s out there and it’s hard to undo.
Increasing those tariffs has been a big talking point for Trump lately. How does Harris argue against them?
Answer honestly. She doesn’t want to get rid of them, but she doesn’t want to drastically raise them. To be clear, when Harris says the “Trump Tax Plan” (ie, tariffs) will cost you $4k/year she means the new proposed ones he wants to implement, not the ones already in place by both Trump in 2017’ish and newer ones added by Biden.
Biden just modestly expanded those recently this year. Assuming she is not going to remove them, and nothing indicates she wants to, is to say: having limited, targeted, and reasonable tariffs is good for the US for these X, Y, Z reasons…I’ll keep these in place to protect whoever. Trump wants to raise and broaden them and doing that is reckless and will hurt the consumers to the tune of $4k/year. Something like that. Own it, but clearly differentiate. Maybe don’t say “tariff” because no one likely knows what that means.
She was asked about this directly in the debate, did not answer it, and the moderators did not f/u to get a direct answer. So her clear stance is still hanging out there if it’s going to be different than what Biden is doing now (kind of pro-tariff).
Now, it isn’t just the goods coming from China. It’s also the ships that were made in China: