Earlier today, I went on NewsMax+ to talk about tariffs. I was joined by Alex Acosta, the former Secretary of Labor from 2017-2019. He was, unsurprisingly, in favor of the tariffs and cited the fact that Canada was considering moving some of its manufacturing capacity to the US to avoid the tariffs. Secretary Acosta is thrilled at this increased investment in the US.
I, on the other hand, am not.
The simple fact of the matter is that Trump is, in effect, bullying countries that are much more reliant on the US than we are on them. First Columbia, then Mexico, and now Canada. Trump and his supporters should not call this a victory, though.
As I explained on NewsMax earlier today, this strategy is much less likely to work against “adversaries” like China and the EU. They are much, much less reliant on trade with the US than Columbia, Mexico, and Canada.
Further, Trump is far from the first president to try to “get tough with China.” At least since the second Bush presidency, every president has enacted tariffs on China to try to get them to play by “the rules.” And it has failed every single time. It’s time for a new strategy.
I also mentioned that the Canadian firms moving to the US, while nice, are not going to make up for the lost jobs in other sectors due to, you guessed it, higher prices for consumer goods and for manufacturing. Making manufacturing more costly doesn’t sound like “boosting manufacturing” to me.