President Donald Trump’s strategy to use import tariffs to protect and boost U.S. manufacturers backfired and led to job losses and higher prices, according to a Federal Reserve study released this week.
“We find that the 2018 tariffs are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices,” concluded Fed economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce, in an academic paper.
While the tariffs did reduce competition for some industries in the domestic U.S. market, this was more than offset by the effects of rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs, the study found.
“While the longer-term effects of the tariffs may differ from those that we estimate here, the results indicate that the tariffs, thus far, have not led to increased activity in the U.S. manufacturing sector,” the study said.
Tit-for-tat trade retaliation is an idea best relegated to the past, given the presence of globally interconnected supply chains, the Fed researchers found.
The top ten manufacturing industries hit by foreign retaliatory tariffs were producers of: magnetic and optical media, leather goods, aluminum sheet, iron and steel, motor vehicles, household appliances, sawmills, audio and video equipment, pesticide, and computer equipment.
Two things:
(1)The federal researchers who found this will probably be labeled Democrats, Obama appointees, etc because these days facts are like incest: relative. Trump and Fox News political entertainers will be hyping the tariffs as a huge success.
(2) Many economists and pundits had predicted this would happen.
No surprise. Tariffs hurt the American people.https://t.co/WrPzih2J44
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) December 28, 2019
A. He’d never understand it.
B. He’d lie and say China is paying and the fed study is fake news.
C. He’d lie and say big beautiful trade deals are coming and it was all worth it.#trumptradewar #trumptariffs— Just another Minnesotan (@somanylakes) December 28, 2019
So much winning….for the 1%. Fed study finds Trump tariffs backfired #SmartNews https://t.co/Pwgh27Y7qe
— Kimberly Brickley (@KCBrickley) December 27, 2019
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.