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Why the Rust Belt economy will suffer in a trade war
John C. Austin March 6, 2018
...Trumps proposed tariffs, which many see as his latest negotiating tactic to make Mexico and Canada accept his demands on NAFTA, are unlikely to help these Midwestern voters and their communities. The early consensus is that the tariffs would cost many more jobs than they will keep or create. As Economic Outlook Group chief economist Bernard Baumohl put it, More workers in the U.S. make products that are made from steel, than make steel itself.
As my Brookings colleague Joe Parilla noted last spring, more than half of North American trade occurs in intermediate goodsmaterials or components that companies import and integrate into the production of a final good. Nowhere is this more evident than in steel and aluminum markets, where Trump is proposing to fire his opening protectionist salvo...
Our Midwest executives famously say, we dont so much trade as we make things together, particularly in the tightly wound Great Lakes economy. An auto part may cross the U.S.-Canada border seven or more times as it is built up to a finished product. Wheat or corn may cross an international border to be processed, packaged, and returned as crackers, oil, or Cheetos. That is why the single largest trading location by value on earth is the bridge and tunnel crossing between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, where well over $100 billion in goods crosses the international border annually.... By weakening NAFTA and imposing new tariffs on critical imports, President Trump would threaten the well-being of the very workers and communities that supported him most.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2018/03/06/why-the-rust-belt-economy-will-suffer-in-a-trade-war/
When the Brookings uses Cheetos as an example in an article, it must be posted.
FarCenter
(19,429 posts)A proper pricing of CO2 emissions would probably make a lot of these extended supply chains uneconomical.
Phoenix61
(16,954 posts)to make steel and aluminum those Midwest workers won't be hired. The foundaries will be automated and require high-skilled workers to run the robotics. I believe that's partly how the US steel industry lost its competitive edge in the first place. They didn't update their equipment and their competitors did.
bronxiteforever
(9,287 posts)He is as dumb as a box of rocks.
SWBTATTReg
(21,859 posts)infrastructure is tied to so many things that one just doesn't come up w/ tariffs on a dime like tRUMP does, w/ each of his temper fits. He gets up one morning, and something airs on faux news, and then he's all up in the air about it. This guy is NOT intelligent, this guy doesn't care about the rest of us. Period.
He's a joke, a fraud, a crook, and not my president.