Forum Overview :: Balance of Power
 
Re: At least the steel tariff worked. by Furcifer 01/06/2020, 6:25pm PST
Mysterio wrote:

It's now obvious that President Trump's steel tariff didn't work
This is basically the first article I've read that tries to explain the steel tariffs, and while it seems pretty clear, I'm having trouble understanding how it demonstrates that the tariffs "didn't work."

  1. Trump imposes a tariff on imports of Chinese steel.
  2. Steel prices immediately almost double.
  3. US steelmakers go on "an expansion spree."
  4. Employment in the steel industry increases modestly, bucking the previous trend.
  5. Steel prices rapidly fall to a level slightly below where they were before the tariff.

This is all straight from the article, and sounds to me like a tariff working exactly the way tariffs are supposed to work.

The author points out that steel prices overshot on the down side, bottoming out near $500. But he fails to mention that they quickly bounced back to the $600 range, right where they were before the 2016 election. The final analysis showed that employment in the steel industry only expanded 1.3% during the tariff period, but this has to be viewed against a contraction of 7% over the previous 5 years. It was a modest success at best, perhaps, but certainly not a failure, at least not based on any of the data presented in that article.

By the way, I had to calculate those percentages myself, because the author only quotes the raw numbers. He apparently wants to make some dismissive point about how the US steel industry is really small and we shouldn't care about those people anyway. First, he compares it to the size of the entire job market, because that would make absolutely anything look small. Then he compares it to the size of Home Depot, because... they sell some things made out of steel, I guess? According to Editor-in-Chief of the Metro Times Lee DeVito, we can start completely ignoring industries with fewer than 400,000 workers. I wonder how many professional editors are currently working in the US?
bls.gov wrote:

Number of Jobs, 2018 118,300
Job Outlook, 2018-28 -3% (Decline)
Employment Change, 2018-28 -3,400
Mr. DeVito has since moved on to covering more serious economic issues that affect the entire country, such as the fact that Domino's raised their prices on New Year's Eve in Times Square.
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        At least the steel tariff worked. by Mysterio 12/24/2019, 1:22pm PST NEW
            Re: At least the steel tariff worked. by Furcifer 01/06/2020, 6:25pm PST NEW
                Re: At least the steel tariff worked. by Vested Id 01/06/2020, 11:46pm PST NEW
                    Re: At least the steel tariff worked. by Ulrachi 01/07/2020, 7:52am PST NEW
 
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