President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks on America’s Energy Dominance and Manufacturing Revival Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2019, at the Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex in Monaca, Pa. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)
At The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan tells Americans that President Trump is using tariffs as a weapon to stop the looting of America that has taken 70,000 factories and 5 million manufacturing jobs out of the country. He writes (abridged):
Trump is using tariffs to coerce China to stop cheating on the trade rules we have established and grant us the same access to her markets as Chinese producers have to American markets.
Trump is betting his presidency he can pull it off.
Trump seeks to throw out a free trade policy that, rooted in 19th-century ideology rather than U.S. national interests, threw open American markets to the world and produced, over three decades, $12 trillion in trade deficits and a loss of 70,000 factories and five million manufacturing jobs.
Like the Russian army carting off German factories after World War II, the Great Arsenal of Democracy was looted by its postwar allies and adversaries alike.
The weapon Trump is using to stop this looting is tariffs, a price of admission into the U.S. market to replace the free passes foreign nations and transnational companies have had to produce abroad and sell into the USA.
Read more here.
