re: Whirlpool,supporter of early tariffs on appliances, say steel tariffs are hurting them bad

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There is a difference. Where the left loves tariffs, Trump is using them to get to not having any tariffs. If our trade partners would agree to no tariffs they would be gone.

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Oh really? Clinton signed NAFTA. George bush imposed steel tariffs. Obama helped negotiate TPP, which sought to lower tariffs. Now trump is blowing up tariffs again.

Yep. This is probably the most important thing happening at the moment and it’s absolutely worthy of discussion, much more so than the "I hate libs are ya with me!" threads that much of the time lack much substance. There’s room for those too but talking about the most important thing going on is important too,

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People trying to support their families.

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I understand that but I've been on the other side of it too. I own a small fabricating shop and we had a whole night shift dedicated to one customer. We are required by them to use domestic material. Well guess what they did? They decided to set up a mfg shop in China. They could use cheap steel and cheap labor while making us use higher priced domestic steel. They took about 500k/year out of my company and sent it to China. Had to shut the shift down and send 8 hard working welders home. That was the Bush years. Then along came Obama and shut down the coal industry which was our 2nd largest customers main industry.

Well, why not raise your prices $20. America will pay for made in America products.

AND the foreign competition will absolutely raise their prices.

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Leftist have always been tariffs supporters.

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nobody with any trade type protections is a real FREE TRADER by definition not even reagan.

Forced Japan to accept restraints on auto exports. The agreement set total Japanese auto exports at 1.68 million
vehicles in 1981-82, 8 percent below 1980 exports. Two years later the level was permitted to rise to 1.85 million.(33)
Clifford Winston of the Brookings Institution found that the import limits have actually cost jobs in the U.S. auto
industry by making it possible for the sheltered American automakers to raise prices and limit production. In 1984,
Winston writes in Blind Intersection? Policy and the Automobile Industry, 32,000 jobs were lost, U.S. production fell
by 300,000 units, and profits for U.S. firms increased $8.9 billion. The quotas have also made the Japanese firms
potentially more formidable rivals because they have begun building assembly plants in the United States.(34) They
also shifted production to larger cars, introducing to American firms competition they did not have before the quotas
were created. In 1984, it was estimated that higher prices for domestic and imported cars cost consumers $2.2 billion a
year.(35) At the height of the dollar's exchange rate with the yen in 1984-85, the quotas were costing American
consumers the equivalent of $11 billion a year.(36)
-- Tightened up considerably the quotas on imported sugar. Imports fell from an annual average of 4.85 million tons in
1979-81 to an annual average of 2.86 million tons in 1982-86. Not only did this continued practice force Americans to
spend more than other consumers for sugar, but it created hardships for Latin American countries and the Philippines,
which depend on sugar exports for economic development. The quota program undermined President Reagan's
Caribbean Basin Initiative and intensified the international debt crisis.(37)
-- Negotiated to increase restrictiveness of the Multifiber Arrangement and extended restrictions to previously
unrestricted textiles. The administration unilaterally changed the rule of origin in order to restrict textile and apparel
imports further and imposed a special ceiling on textiles from the People's Republic of China.(38) Finally, it pressured
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea, the largest exporters of textiles and apparel to the United States, into highly
restrictive bilateral agreements. All told, textile and apparel restrictions cost Americans more than $20 billion a
year.(39) The Reagan administration has stated several times that textile and apparel imports should grow no faster
than the domestic market.(40)
-- Required 18 countries--including Brazil, Spain, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, Finland, and Australia,
as well as the European Community--to accept "voluntary restraint agreements" to reduce steel imports, guaranteeing
domestic producers a share of the American market. When 3 countries not included in the 18--Canada, Sweden, and
Taiwan-- increased steel exports to the United States, the administration demanded talks to check the increase. The
administration also imposed tariffs and quotas on specialty steel. These policies, with their resulting shortages, have
severely squeezed American steel-using firms, making them less competitive in world markets and eliminating more
than 52,000 jobs.(41)
-- Imposed a five-year duty, beginning at 45 percent, on Japanese motorcycles for the benefit of Harley Davidson,
which admitted that superior Japanese management was the cause of its problems.(42)
-- Raised tariffs on Canadian lumber and cedar shingles.
-- Forced the Japanese into an agreement to control the price of computer memory-chip exports and increase Japanese
purchases of American-made chips. When the agreement was allegedly broken, the administration imposed a 100
percent tariff on $300 million worth of electronics goods. This episode teaches a classic lesson in how protectionism
comes back to haunt a country's producers. The quotas established as a result of the agreement have created a severe
shortage of memory chips and higher prices for American computer makers, putting them at a disadvantage with
foreign competitors. Only two American firms are still making these chips, accounting for a small percentage of the
world market.(43)
-- Removed Third World countries from the duty-free import program for developing nations on several occasions.
-- Pressed Japan to force its automakers to buy more American-made parts.(44)
-- Demanded that Taiwan, West Germany, Japan, and Switzerland restrain their exports of machine tools, with some
market shares rolled back to 1981 levels. Other countries were warned not to increase their shares of the U.S. market.
-- Accused the Japanese of dumping roller bearings, because the price did not rise to cover a fall in the value of the
yen. The U.S. Customs Service was ordered to collect duties equal to the so-called dumping margins.(45)
-- Accused the Japanese of dumping forklift trucks and color picture tubes.(46)
-- Failed to ask Congress to end the ban on the export of Alaskan oil and of timber cut from federal lands, a measure
that could substantially increase U.S. exports to Japan.
-- Redefined "dumping" in order "to make it easier to bring charges of unfair trade practices against certain
competitors."(47)
-- Beefed up the Export-Import Bank, an institution dedicated to promoting the exports of a handful of large
companies at the expense of everyone else.(48)
-- Extended quotas on imported clothespins.
This abominable record has moved many former trade specialists in the Reagan administration to criticize the
administration they once worked for. Gerald Marks, former director of the Chicago office of the Commerce
Department's U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service, called the policy toward Japan "myopic at best, dangerous to the
world trading structure at worst."(49) Harald Malmgren, a former trade negotiator, said the administration has been
"resorting to vigilante-style unilateral retaliation."(5


LINK

Muh film tax credits

Absolutely

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America will pay for made in America products.

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Cheap foreign goods are a huge economic benefit for the USA. Even many "made in America" products use quite a bit of imported parts, or machinery.

No one gives a frick that you don't like Trump. Some of us are a little more pragmatic than "free market or bust." Not everyone is a shrubber? living in bumfrick Alaska because they have poor people skills and love isolation. You people are the type that bask in ridiculing the real people who have lost jobs to overseas companies because unfree trade practices from other countries that treat their citizens like disposable garbage and socialist utopias that we subsidize while they make it impossible to export our goods to because high tariffs.


Trump is using what he can work with to better the plight of the average American. He got Congress to pass tax cuts and his administration has been hacking away at business killing regulations. That said, he doesn't have much he can unilaterally do. You know that but conveniently choose to ignore it. Trump has tariffs to negotiate with and hes going to use them to get better, freer trade deals. If he was truly a tariff guy, he wouldn't have offered zero-tariff deals.

I don't like tariffs, but I also don't like that we get fist fricked on trade. I think manufacturers should survive via ingenuity and efficiency but at the same time, its not right that our government allows such an uneven playing field to exist. I don't think tariffs are the answer, but im pragmatic enough to know that tariffs are a powerful negotiating tool.