It's just telling that you've got an authoritarian playbook that sort of, at every pass, seems to be more focused on driving up corporate profits at the expense of the American people.
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The Case for Free Trade
response to four rounds of tariffs plus an attempted Phase One agreement. The Biden Administration has left the tariffs in place and is expanding them to pursue progressive policy goals.
The first order of business for a new Administration that is focused on American workers and consumers is to repeal all tariffs enacted under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962* and Sections 201 and 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.” The President can do this unilaterally, and Congress can do it through legislation.
The second order of business requires Congress to pass legislation repealing Sections 232, 201, and 301. The U.S. Constitution places all taxing authority with Congress** and none with the President. Congress used those provisions of law to delegate some of its taxing authority to the President because it was having trouble passing “clean” tariff legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. Unless and until this constitutional question about delegation is addressed, important reforms are available to the next Congress and the next President.
Congress faced a problem of collective action in the 1960s and 1970s. As awhole, Members generally wanted to lower tariffs, but few individual Members were willing to remove tariffs that benefited special interests in their districts. Trade bills were invariably watered down through amendments and logrolling. The thinking was that the President, whose constituency is the entire nation, would be less prone to special-interest pleading than Members of Congress would be, so Congress delegated some of its tariff-making authority to the President in 1962 and 1974 trade legislation.
Delegating tariff-making might have worked in the short run, but in the long run, it was both constitutionally dubious and ripe for abuse. That came to pass in 2018. The Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs, invoked in 2018 against Canada, Europe, and other allies on national security grounds, raised car prices by an average of $250 per vehicle and gave America the world’s highest steel prices. They also harmed the construction, canned food and beverage, and other metal-using industries.
While this may have benefited the steel industry itself, each steel job saved cost an average of $650,000 per year that had been taken from elsewhere in the economy.™ That is no way to strengthen American manufacturing. The New York Federal Reserve estimated in 2019 that the Section 301 China tariffs cost the average household $831 per year,” a figure that has likely increased with inflation.
The new tariffs have a clear record of failure—as conservative economists almost unanimously warned would be the case. Job number one for the next Administration is to return to sensible trade policies and eliminate the destructive Trump- Biden tariffs.
Strengthening American Manufacturing. The decline of American manufacturing is acommon political trope in both parties, typically invoked before a call for more government intervention. This narrative has several problems. One is that