It is axiomatic that if someone is sufficiently eager to disbelieve something, there is no Everest of evidence too large to be ignored. This explains today’s revival of protectionism, which is a plan to make America great again by making it 1953 again.
This was when manufacturing’s postwar share of the labor force peaked at about 30 percent. The decline that began then was not caused by manufactured imports from today’s designated villain, China, which was a peasant society. Rather, the war-devastated economies of competitor nations were reviving. And, domestically, the age of highly technological manufacturing was dawning.
According to a Ball State University study, of the 5.6 million manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2010, trade accounted for 13 percent of job losses and productivity improvements accounted for more than 85 percent. China is shedding manufacturing jobs because of productivity improvements.
Douglas A. Irwin of Dartmouth College noted that Chinese imports may have cost almost 1 million manufacturing jobs in nearly a decade, but “the normal churn of U.S. labor markets results in roughly 1.7 million layoffs every month.” He notes that here are more than 45 million Americans in poverty, “stretching every dollar they have.” The apparel industry employs 135,000 Americans. Can one really justify tariffs that increase the price of clothing for the 45 million in order to save some of the 135,000 low-wage jobs? Anyway, if tariffs target apparel imports from China, imports will surge from other low-wage developing nations.
Failed policies
In his book “An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy,” Marc Levinson recalls the 1970 agonies about Japanese bolts, nuts and screws. Under the 1974 Trade Act, companies or unions claiming “serious injury” — undefined by the law — from imports could demand tariffs to price the imports out of the market. Of the hundreds of U.S. bolt, nut and screw factories, some were, Levinson writes, “highly automated, others so old that gloved workers held individual bolts with tongs to heat them in a forge.” A three-year 15 percent tariff enabled domestic producers to raise their prices, thereby raising the costs of many American manufacturers. By one estimate, each U.S. job “saved” cost $550,000 as the average bolt-nut-screw worker was earning $23,000 annually. And by the mid-1980s, inflation-adjusted sales of domestic makers were 15 percent below the 1979 level.
Levinson notes that Ronald Reagan imposed “voluntary restraints” on Japanese automobile exports, thereby creating 44,100 U.S. jobs. But the cost to consumers was $8.5 billion in higher prices, or $193,000 per job created, six times the average annual pay of a U.S. autoworker. And there were job losses in sectors of the economy into which the $8.5 billion of consumer spending could not flow.
The past is prologue. The future probably will feature many more such self-defeating government interventions in the name of compassion as protectionist America tries to cower its way to being great again.
George F. Will is a columnist for theWashington Post Writers Group. Email: georgewill@washpost.com.
Morning Briefing Newsletter
Get a rundown of the latest local and regional news every Mon-Fri morning.
