Report Inappropriate Comments

I think anyone who has followed this knows that Pete Stauber is full of wind. His "facts" are garnered from the Trump-Republican playbook. Some, of course, will believe what he's throwing out there believing their "way of life" is being threatened. Stauber's latest is a letter he penned to the President about not lifting Steel tariffs with China. As many know, Trump threw out a whole bunch of trade tariffs in his administration thinking countries would bow to his supreme being. All it did was hurt, consumers.

American firms and consumers paid the vast majority of the cost of Trump’s tariffs.

While tariffs benefited some workers in import-competing industries, they hurt workers in sectors that rely on imported inputs and those in exporting industries facing retaliation from trade partners.

Trump’s tariffs did not help the U.S. negotiate better trade agreements or significantly improve national security.

Geoffrey Gertz Former Brookings Expert

I suppose Stauber and his fellow Trumpians will extol the virtues of their hard work for the American worker and convince some voters that the evil Democrats are just trying to be globalists and socialists. If they worried about their bottom line, they would realize we trade with other countries as a country. Every President has had good and bad advisors. Trump didn't care what his advisors as a whole had to offer. He was in it for himself and he likes a fight. That fight helped to get higher prices for appliances. When the pandemic hit, factories were shut down. Demand went up for consumer goods, fueling a hike in prices. If you ordered a dishwasher, you waited a long time and paid more for it than the year before.

Trump didn't bring more jobs back to America. David Dollar with Brooking interviewed Sandra Polaski, a senior research scholar at Boston University's Global Development Policy Center back in October of 2020.

DOLLAR: So let’s start with the big picture. President Trump had specific criticisms of the results of U.S. trade policy, and he’s used tariffs and new trade agreements to try to reduce the trade deficit and bring back manufacturing jobs. What do you think is the overall scorecard for this approach?

POLASKI: Well, let’s start with the trade deficit, David, because that’s actually President Trump’s preferred scorecard. He likes to refer to that as what will judge whether he’s been successful. And on that scorecard, on the trade deficit, it’s a fail. I give him a fail on that. The overall trade deficit, including both goods and services, has gotten worse every year of Trump’s presidency than it was when he took over from Obama. The deficit in goods alone— think manufactured goods, think inputs, intermediate goods— all of those things that you can touch and handle, the things that would bring jobs back, has actually been the worst in the last couple of years that it has ever been in U.S. history. So that’s a good first indication of how Trump scores on his trade approach. By the way, this year the trade deficit is on track to again set a record as the worst ever in U.S. history.

Turning to manufacturing jobs; you asked about manufacturing jobs. Well, Trump, as most people know, inherited a very long recovery after the 2008 financial crisis and the recession of 2009. There was a big stimulus package, there was an auto industry bailout, and the U.S. economy began to recover in general and the manufacturing industry began to recover. So over the years of the Obama administration there was a gradual recovery in manufacturing jobs and hours worked. Trump managed to destroy that through his ill-advised tariff tantrums in a short two years and put manufacturing into a recession. He was like a child taking a toy, a nice toy that somebody had, playing rough with it and breaking it. And this was even before the economy went into a tailspin due to his mishandling of the coronavirus. So, again, on manufacturing jobs, he gets a fail.

I doubt whether Pete Stauber will ever get his "facts" straight on anything be it jobs or the environment. Meanwhile, we have a person in office that shouldn't be in office.