Dear America,
There's finally something on which I agree...in principle...with Donald Trump. We need tariffs to protect American labor. As to intellectual property protection, I don't think tariffs are the answer; individual companies being asked to give up their proprietary technology information ceasing to do business with Chinese companies is the answer. Besides, American corporations are at least as predatory as Chinese companies and the Chinese government, so let them prey on each other. But labor shouldn't have to pay the price for corporate greed, and the solution to that problem is to charge them tariffs for everything they have manufactured abroad when they bring it into the United States. To my way of thinking, if it's made abroad, no matter what corporation is making it, it should be taxed when it crosses our border, and the Democrats actually tried to implement such a strategy after the Republicans became the majority. But Republicans don't think business should pay any price for cupidity, so the effort failed several times.
To make the point, let me reiterate a point made by the New York Times a couple of years ago. Apple has many of its products assembled in China by a company called Foxconn, I-Phones in particular. There are differing points of view on this subject, but the reporters for The Times indicated that the cost savings for Apple stemming from using Foxconn instead of American labor was about $5 per unit...$5 on a then $600 unit. Of course profit is profit, no matter how big or how small. But even conceding that point, taxing Apple $5 per unit when they cross the border will hardly dent their $250 billion reserves, whereas it might put thousands of Americans back to work. That is the kind of tariff I endorse: assessing American corporations the savings they reap when using foreign labor. By American corporations I don't just mean Apple. Ford makes models in Mexico, as does General Motors. And of course, Volkswagen and BMW make some of their cars here. I don't know the details, such as do Americans buy the Volkswagens and BMW's made here or are they exported, or both, but taxing American corporations for making things abroad so that they can sell them here seems like a good idea...a tariff I can get behind without worrying about a trade war.
Unfortunately, that isn't what Donald Trump is enacting. Instead, he is singling out China with a tariff intended to vindicate American corporate rights to their patented ideas. Frankly, a punitive tariff doesn't seem quite the good idea that our president makes it out to be. I think tariffs shouldn't be punitive. They should be compensatory. If we tax American manufacturers' goods when they cross the borders of our company in an amount equal to what they saved by getting the work on their products done somewhere else, that is compensatory. If we tax them twice as much, that is punitive, and that sounds like what Trump is doing with China. He started out with tariffs on steel and aluminum, but once our allies began screaming, he exempted them--Canada, the EU, etc.--but there is some symmetry in tariffs on Chinese steel as the companies that make the steel are subsidized by the Chinese government, which undermines the position of American labor the same way as does shipping jobs abroad to save a buck here or there. But imposing a tax as a punishment for general ethical lapses is another thing entirely.
So, I support the idea of tariffs if they actually protect American workers. If they are intended to protect American businesses though, that's another thing.
I think motive matters in just about everything. It's often the difference between moral and immoral, or in Donald Trump's case, amoral. That's why this Russia investigation is so important. We have democratic remedies for immorality and amorality in government, and the Russians are trying to undermine that system, which protects us from ongoing predation when it works right, and exposes us to it when it doesn't, like in November 2016. Remember that this November.
Your friend,
Mike
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