Fiction: Liberal Democratic voters support the TPP.

[shaayecanaan]

12. There's some room for cutting tariffs without precipitous job losses...

Have a look at the current tariff schedule for the United States:-

http://hts.usitc.gov/

There's some incredibly baroque and obscure stuff in there. Synthetic fibres are still subject to a 30% tariff even though there isn't commercial production of any synthetic fibres in the US anymore. French cheese is subject to a 100% tariff, French wine isn't, because French wine is too popular to tax extensively.

Some tariffs preserve some jobs, but extremely inefficiently. Current tariffs on sneakers is 48%. There are only 1500 jobs left in US domestic sneaker production (New Balance). The sneaker tariffs paid mainly by working class Americans end up being about $3 billion a year, which is a fuckload of money to pay to preserve 1500 jobs.

Same with the agricultural tariffs. The farm bill is already around $300 billion a year in subsidies, and on top of that you have tariffs - for example of up to 17% on sugar, meaning that extra energy is spent by US food producers making corn into sugar (or more accurately, high fructose corn syrup) rather than simply using sugar made out of sugar.

Most sugar production is mechanised, so there are not many jobs at stake, but it keeps a few families in Florida and Hawaii riding high on the hog. Meanwhile your average American family pays about $20 a year in sugar tariffs alone, and thats just one tariff.