re: US Steel to restart Illinois plant

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There are a lot of rumors that USS is about to fire back up in Birmingham.

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They will have to build the planned eaf or a new blast furnace considering they demolished #8 blast furnace last year. All the equipment from the qbop, hot strip and pickle lines are currently up for auction.

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They will have to build the planned eaf or a new blast furnace considering they demolished #8 blast furnace last year. All the equipment from the qbop, hot strip and pickle lines are currently up for auction.

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They are about to start building all the new buildings they had planned 4-5 years ago. I know who got that contract and he told me that it is about to start. This was about 3 weeks ago.

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Never claimed that, however modernization to get to competitiveness seems like a good deal.

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I'd rather take advantage of another country eating the cost of an important input into many of our industries.

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Then you fundamentally misunderstand markets. The pricing mechanism only works when it's not manipulated. The amount of time, energy and money the Chinese put in to subsidizing and undercutting the steel market... that's added loss that could go somewhere else. Even if it makes some components cheaper, it's a massive net loss for the economy. The time, energy and money could be diverted( and much more efficiently), to not producing steel below cost and to purchasing other goods and services... or even producing other goods and services that the US consumes. It also robs other more efficient producers of providing goods services, and their associated capital, with something they are less suited to do.

Let's look at the global semiconductor market. The US has produced 50% of or more of the global market since its inception... except the 5 years the Japanese flooded the market with inferior, but vastly cheaper, semiconductors in the late 80s. Why? The US was, and still is the best to produce them. Better innovation, great access to sand, etc etc etc. But when the Japanese were "eating the cost of an important input" they dominated the market. This might have made your stereo slightly cheaper, but the components were inferior, the market was stifled, and everyone lost. The Japanese weren't innovative enough, or prepared enough to push the market forward without cheating, and they were putting legitimate players out of business. In turn, if they just imported the semiconductors from the US the whole time, they could have shut down their excess capacity and innovated in something they were better at.

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So happy 500 workers could benefit while the rest of the 320MM citizens face higher prices!

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I wonder if you felt the same about Obamacare.

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The constitution calls for the Legislative branch to impose tariffs

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You stated Federal Gov. I showed you Federal Gov.

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Trump is using a rarely cited national defense exemption from the 70s to impose this tariff.

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It is a matter of National Defense. Do you know why we won WW2? Our Steel production.

We have one plant in the USA that can produce Electrical Steel used in LPTs. An LPT takes up to 2 years to build. Should an attack happen, parts of the USA would be crippled. This goes way beyond allies and enemies.

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Then you fundamentally misunderstand markets. The pricing mechanism only works when it's not manipulated. The amount of time, energy and money the Chinese put in to subsidizing and undercutting the steel market... that's added loss that could go somewhere else. Even if it makes some components cheaper, it's a massive net loss for the economy. The time, energy and money could be diverted( and much more efficiently), to not producing steel below cost and to purchasing other goods and services... or even producing other goods and services that the US consumes. It also robs other more efficient producers of providing goods services, and their associated capital, with something they are less suited to do. 

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This is not a good take. consumers will buy the option that is the best value to them regardless of who subsidizes what. If China wants to undercut US steel, then it must produce steel good enough to beat the value of US steel. That means that consumers are winning. paying less for steel that meets their needs in a comparable way.

if the US producers want to maintain sales volumes, they must either innovate, or beg for protection and subsidy. only one of those two drives innovation.

I find it absolutely crazy how far people are willing to go to justify welfare, subsides, and taxes. now we have people rejecting markets and capitalism on the basis that other countries aren't embracing markets as widely as everyone else, thus we need to "level the field" for US manufacturing. Of course, that idea isn't applied consistently across all areas of production, and few complain about how US subsidies impact other countries "free markets"

The US has been buying low quality steel from our trading partners for decades. Which also means that the steel used in our military vehicles, ships, and planes is inferior as well.

Get stateside production moving. American Steel. American workers. Don’t forget about our clean burning coal. Will be necessary I believe when production ramps up.

The more self sufficient we are as a nation, the better off we will all be.

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We have one plant in the USA that can produce Electrical Steel used in LPTs.

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This is simply not true. You keep confusing who produces with who is currently capable. The problem we would have with lpt production wouldn't be with steel mills it would lie with the manufacturer. Any us steel maker could switch soley to electrical steel and produce enough in a couple months to supply lpt manufacturing for years.

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Why are you ok with the Federal government attempting to "pick" winners?

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Since when is giving the middle finger to foreign countries who undercut US domestic free markets "picking winners"?

There's this misconception that because we get most of our imported steel from Canada and Brazil, that this means the tariff is effecting the wrong countries. This is an ignorant and obtuse narrative that's intention is to demean Trump instead of being honest about the underlying problem going on in the global steel market.

We are only importing as much steel as we do because China caused a global overcapacity crisis about 15 years ago and this led to a widespread reduction in demand for US steel, which in turn forced dozens of steel manufacturing plants to close and tens of thousands of steel workers to lose their jobs.

It was easy to recognized that China was gaming the system, undercutting prices and taking losses (subordinated by the Chinese government) in the short-term for the sole purpose of gaining significant market share in the long-term, while also weakening our economy and forcing us to import steel from competing countries.

We have to import from Canada and Brazil because we reduced our domestic manufacturing capacity by ~20% since 2000. And because we're certainly not going to get it from China, who caused the situation to begin with. Meanwhile, China has gone from a 5% global share supplier to a 50% global share supplier in just 15 freaking years.




China has a stranglehold on steel pricing at this point.

We MUST get our domestic manufacturing capacity back on line or else our entire steel industry is going to go under and we will end up being nearly 100% dependent on foreign competition to supply our steel needs.

There is a much bigger underlying issue here than costs going up today due to a tariff.