Donald Trump is our first president to have both publicly acknowledged the international trading system has badly failed America and has the insight and courage to pursue corrective policies. The failed policies over the last 30 years or so have produced middle class economic decline driven by hollowing out communities as our economic engines move offshore. Hollowed out communities are prevalent, not only throughout Western Pennsylvania but throughout the nation.
America and a very few other nations employ what is generally referred to as a free-trade system, a system that put few restrictions on trade. The problem with America’s trade execution is a bias to import largely consumer consumption items, and that has consistently overwhelmed the dollar value of our product exports. Foreign countries return their excess dollars to our capital accounts, buying things like T-bills, farm land, stocks and bonds, and other financial instruments. So, America’s financiers become wealthy while our blue-collar workers struggle.
Meanwhile, most of our trading partners employ what is generally referred to as an industrial trade policy with the objective of creating wealth for their country at the expense of their trading partners; think America. Elements of their industrial policy include tariffs and a host of non-tariff barriers such as currency manipulation, government subsidies, tax system bias, outright import blockage, etc. This is why today the administration is or will be negotiating with 130 or so countries to achieve balanced trade.
Let’s pray they succeed so we can quit subsidizing the world, enriching America’s financial elites, and begin the financial restoration of America’s middle class.
Raymond Smith
Hampton