America's massive trade deficit: Why BIG tariffs won't hurt the United States

[pampango]

140. As I said in #115: "I will not ask you to say hi to your 'friends' in certain conservative groups

Last edited Fri Sep 7, 2012, 08:00 AM - Edit history (1)

with whom you share certain towards trade. ("Strange bedfellows" are hard to avoid in this discussion.) I know that your motivations are totally different from theirs and I acknowledge that any shared attitudes you happen to have with them are for entirely different reasons than theirs."

"You don't need to research national laws anywhere to know that none of these countries have laws against closing a factory and moving it overseas."

You don't know that any more than I know the opposite. Many progressive countries have policies regarding the closing of factories for any reason. (That's why republicans argue that companies won't build factories in some progressive countries, saying it is because they are too hard to close when they become 'uncompetitive'.)

AND the fact is that these countries have strong and widespread unions at the same time that they trade much more extensively than the US does. That may seem illogical to you, but facts tend to have a logic of their own whether you agree with that logic or not.

"We need to pass laws against moving jobs overseas BEFORE we do away with the right-to-work laws."

You didn't really explain WHY we should go after foreigners before we go after Americans who have been weakening our unions for decades. Are foreigners (kind of the classic "them" in the "us vs. them" mindset) just a more inviting target? AND if it is really the corporations (not, let's say, Kenyans, as an ) that we are targeting, why not go after both overseas and right-to-work outsourcing at the same time?

I come down on the side of history, which contradicts you robustly about Smoot Hawley.

I think you and I actually agree that S/H did not had little if anything to do with the Depression. It had started already and was caused by other republican policies like deregulation of the financial industry and Wall Street. I think you agree that FDR believed (erroneously in your opinion) that, regardless of the insignificant role that S/H played in causing the Depression, high tariffs would make economic recovery more difficult so he worked to lower tariffs.

What we might not agree on is the role that the republican tariffs passed in 1921 and 1922 (right after they won the presidency and control of congress; their answer to all problems back then was to raise tariffs - just like their answer to every problem now is to cut taxes) played in creating a society that by 1929 had the highest income inequality in US history (only to be surpassed in the bush era of tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, deunionization and dismantling of the safety net). It is not like high republican tariffs in the 1920's created a strong middle class and strong unions. That would happen under FDR and his successors at least until the 1980's.

On edit: Of course the Chamber of Commerce supported the republican bills raising tariffs in 1921, 1922 and 1930. While that would have put you on the side of the Chamber at the time these tariffs were passed that hardly would have made you a "friend" of the Chamber since your reasons for supporting the bills would have been much different from theirs.

It seems to me that you and I believe what we believe regardless of what policy the Chamber happens to be in favor of at any particular moment. The Chamber has been the one that has changed its stance on tariffs not you and I. Whether anyone is a 'friend' of the Chamber at any point in time depends on the ever-changing position that the Chamber happens to take.