Not true at all. Agriculture, semiconductors, consumer electronics, and automotive are examples of other industries tariffs are designed to benefit. Steel is one of many.
The only one I see potentially affected here is agriculture (specifically, manufacturing for agricultural uses), in that businesses have to spend more on steel or buy lower quality steel because they couldn't afford the higher price.
They all benefit from tariffs. Further, by acting collectively it’s easier to get your own pork spending when you support others pork spending.
Get several groups who care a lot about their own issues and little for each other’s issues, and you can push polices that most people disagree with. Of course you need to be carful as alliances pool both support and opposition.
I don’t see how any of those other industries can be expected to benefit from the tariffs:
The tariffs were designed to hurt agriculture, or at least treat it as acceptable collateral damage. It was obvious the Chinese would retaliate by targeting US farmers, and then they did.
How is automotive supposed to benefit from tariffs against Mexico, which the industry heavily relies upon?
How do consumer electronics benefit from tariffs on Chinese electronics components when the tariffs simply force production to other non-US countries (where production plants are already ramped up)? Note that the tariffs on Chines components mean that US assembled consumer devices get taxed at 25%, but foreign (non Chinese) assemblers don’t.
Semiconductors are mostly made in the US, Japan, and South Korea. How do tariffs on Chinese goods help shore up US dominance there?
Sugar tariffs are what enable the massive corn industry to sell otherwise more expensive product corn syrup as a sweetener. Collectively tariffs are a massive subsidy to US agriculture even if not every farmer beniftis equally.
Congress enacted the first sugar tariff in 1789. Politics has changed a lot over time. However, it’s the substitutes of sugar beets outside Florida not sugar cane that provides most US sugar production.
That’s currently less relevant at industrial scales where corn is a fine substitute even if it’s a slightly different chemical and not granular.
Did China ever block Google? Or did google refuse to serve the Chinese market themselves due to the requirement to censor search results. While censorship is bad, it is a legal requirement in China. Even the US wouldn't allow companies violating US sanctions on Iran to do business in the US. Case in point, Bing still works in China and complies with the demands of the Chinese Government.
> 10 years later we're just now joining the fight.
Where did you get that timeframe from? I clearly remember the 2002 steel tariffs under the George W Bush administration [0]. The US' own research into that estimated the impact as:
"ranged between a gain of $65.6 million (0.0006% of GDP) to a loss of $110.0 million (0.0011% of GDP), "with a central estimate of a welfare loss of $41.6 million."
You're making it sound like the US has been this free-trade vanguard while the rest of the world ran rougshod over its principled nature.
Thanks for adding a link. The US' average tariff rate is indeed low. But tariffs are only one instrument of trade policy. The US farming sector is protected against foreign competition due to an absolute advantage in food production that exists because of the $20bn that goes into subsidy and assistance programs each year [0].
The reason every round of WTO trade talks takes years to complete is because of the dispute between rich world farmers and poor-world farmers. It's not just the US, but also the EU and their Common Agricultural Policy that leads to overproduction, waste and export of surpluses to poor countries at below market prices.
How is it the same? There's no ramp up time, no foundries to build and the demand is instantaneous. That doesn't prove tariffs are good policy in the slightest.
Source article points out that tariffs/threats lead to stockpiling of steel, which lead to more capacity coming online given the sales volumes -- but then companies ate from their stockpiles leading to a double-whammy of increased production / decreased demand.
So yes, it's related to global demand -- global demand that went on a primary rollercoaster ride triggered by tariffs. And the news media is rightfully blaming the 1 person (not even party, singular person) for the consequences of their actions. What a sordid state of affairs indeed.
“In response to current market conditions, we are taking actions aligned with our strategy by adjusting our global blast furnace footprint,” the steelmaker said in a release.
Hmmm, I wonder what those "current market conditions" could possibly be? Also from the link you posted:
As the U.S. and China move toward a resumption of trade talks this month, China has lowered its tariff rates for some other countries, CNBC reported citing an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
...
Last month, the U.S. raised tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese products, to which China responded with tariffs on $60 billion in U.S. goods.
That's right. The presence of alternatives or substitute goods is a moderating force on price increases.
The classic example is what meat to buy for dinner: beef has gotten expensive, so it's time to grab the chicken or pork this week. Your choice to choose an alternative to beef will help bring the price back down. We could take the example further to other people's choices, the butcher's response to reduced demand, etc, but we'll stop with: the economy is vastly complex, and all changes in conditions produce complex responses.
My grandfather worked in a machine shop over 30 years ago. Even back then they worked mostly with imported product. According to him, the US steel was very low quality - aimed at industries that needed such huge amounts of it that shipping was expensive and quality wasn't an issue.
If that is still the case, then demand for US steel is determined by infrastructure investment, not trade.
I'm not saying he was wrong, but it's certainly an over simplification. I don't know where he was getting his steel, and it seems very likely that the source of US steel near him was of really low quality. The US steel near me is generally higher quality than the chinese steel around here. For simple hot or cold rolled steel, both are fine.
If you need nice steel, or nice case iron, the Chinese material is bad. You can't really grind any chinese cast iron that I have seen precisely, and none of the steel that I've seen from there has been clean or dimensionally accurate. For most uses, that doesn't matter, and it is totally fine. The European and American tool steel is FAR FAR better than anything that I've seen from china. I tend not to use chinese HSS for steel, since it breaks so easily.
Source: taking a break from machining steel on a bridgeport
Yeah, completely anecdotal. Also not sure of where they imported steel from.
But it is interesting to hear that quality does differ region to region based on the local needs. Again, that makes the case that imported steel vs domestic steel isn't a clear cut issue if proximity matters.
They put tariffs on all steel- not just China. Seriously I fear that Trump is running out of people to piss off.
But hey if you can get those votes in swing districts thats all that matters in the end. A few thousand steelworker votes are more important than all votes in California for POTUS2020 so expect more of the same.
> A few thousand steelworker votes are more important than all votes in California for POTUS2020 so expect more of the same.
I hope you appreciate that this is a very disingenuous argument. the Californian voters would get a lot more attention if they didn't all vote the same way every time.
>The US steel near me is generally higher quality than the chinese steel around here
While this may seem contradictory, it's perfectly natural on an open market.
There's always some demand for cheap, low quality steel and also some demand for the expensive, high quality steel. Knocking together a bookshelf has much different requirements than building a car; the economy needs both.
For the low quality, cheap steel, transportation costs would constitute a higher fraction of cost than for high quality, expensive one. Thus it makes sense to buy the low quality locally, while importing the high quality from far away - where the low q would not be cheap enough due to the transportation. Nonetheless the US has enough of know-how and infrastructure to produce high quality materials whenever there's enough demand.
I firmly believe the current round of tariffs are primarily a geopolitical tool - aimed mostly at imports from China, to help with geopolitical negotiations and also encourage diversification of import sources. Likewise with the recent kerfuffle with Mexico - where the proposed tariffs were used to entice them to handle the immigration crisis. To the boot, the article emphasizes the effect is not really protectionist.
One dilemma is the tariff is more a tax on imports, paid by consumers ie citizens. It complicates trade form China and may convince suppliers or buyers to purchase goods from an alternative source, if available, but has major up front costs. In terms of diversifying supply, tariffs may have an impact over time but due to no preparation by US firms to set up alternative supply chains or sourcing before implementation and considering how many goods come out of China, the US probably will lose a lot more long term than any feasible gains. Without an alternative in place, China can mostly wait it out.
For example, US agriculture like soy beans lost the China market, but China has alternatives able to pick up capacity like from Brazil. Soy Beans aren't a highly refined or engineered product, just a crop that can be grown in bulk in many places around the world. Although the tariffs may now be pushing Apple to source for other countries, there is no in place alternative for a refined, highly engineered good like an iPhone. Short term Apple is hit hard and long term may move to be impacted less, but at the end of the day consumers see higher costs due to the import tax and long term price increases as Apple has to make back their investment in a diversified supply chain. Meanwhile, Us farmers won't get that soy bean market back for many years which will have serious repercussions in that industry.
As a geopolitical tool for trade negotiation a tariff is not great, especially if misused or over used. In this case, targeted tariffs could be an extra straw on top of negotiations to push through a final deal or late stage negotiation. Instead it has been a hammer/nail situation without complexity. Think of it more as the flashy dinner with open bar to seal the deal and less a first time around the table tactic. With the Mexico tariff being a bluff given Mexico had already agreed to discuss or take actions before the tweet was even made, it is feasible the current administration could be smarter about their trade policies or at least try to add nuance to benefit their cards in negotiations. There are better ways of getting someone to the table namely targeted sanctions that don't tax you own citizens or wipe out agricultural exports. As others have said here, there is more than enough material to impose sanctions in many sectors like stolen IP/technologies, human rights violations and concerns, military posturing, and more. Simplifying trade negotiation to tariff this and tariff that is not only a poor tool and negotiation tactic but also damaging to our economy, directly and in the short and long term. We come out behind pretty much regardless of what deal is made, if any.
>tariff is more a tax on imports, paid by consumers ie citizens
Only in the pathological case when most or all imports of the particular good is under the tariffs.
Just for sake of example, suppose for a second America had diversified source of steel; four distinct countries each supplying about 25% of imports. Suppose a tariff was laid on the Chinese imports only. Would the prices of other imports move up? A bit, but much, much less than the tariff. Competition does wonders.
OTOH, if the only significant source of imports is from China -as is the case right now- well yes, in that case the americans will end up paying. Luckily this also creates positive pressure to diversify sources - which in a longer run will make imports much more competitively priced. Doubly luckily, the money raised on tariffs goes into the governmental budget, which means it gets spent back into the american economy anyway (minus the inefficiency of the government).
I think it'll vary from one type of steel to another where the quality sources are. Here in the UK there absolutely are highly specialised grades of steel that we buy in from the US, and I suspect we could buy many more grades from the US if we wanted to. (Typically we can get most stuff from a European mill cheaper and quicker, but that's just a cost and logistic advantage, not a quality issue.)
> Typically we can get most stuff from a European mill cheaper and quicker
For now. Post Brexit that may be a completely different story. It is hard for me to imagine Europe without the single market and its advantages, I recently ordered something from Japan and it has been held up in customs for weeks now.
True, although I think that the difficulty in bringing something in from Japan isn't strictly to do with being in or being out, but rather being in a total clusterfuck of a situation where no one knows what's going to happen next, what the rules will be.
We're going to be living with the clusterfuck for a long time, one way or another.
There are multiple steel industries in the US. Especially back then, you had the very large, bulk producers, like US Steels Sparrow's Point plant (since closed), and then you have the specialty producers that target specific industries or uses.
China produces so much steel that even it itself can not consume it all. Yes, Chinese steel output is going UP with vigor despite steel mills being closed left and right!
India is extremely protectionist with steel, but even it, with its own construction boom going on, gets overflown with semi-legally imported Chinese steel.
In China I think that we should be more concerned with the fact that rich men are building steal buildings to store their capital in. That’s such a waste of resources. How dare you waste our resources investing in steal infra that sits around like empty ghost villages.
This may seem unrelated, but if US was willing to worsen its relations with china, and introduce tarifs punishing its own economy, it should have done it as sanctions against the horrible things China does to people in Xinjiang. Stories told by Kazakhs who were released from concentration camps in China are terrifying [1], and USA is one of the few countries that could actually help.
It would help if the U.S. had a leg to stand on; the official numbers point to us having higher incarceration per capita; and both the public perception and medical statistics point to rape being expected in prison.
The state massively rounding up religious minorities and harvesting the organs of its prison population is practically the same thing as being incarcerated in a non-restorative justice system with shitty incentives where prisoners assault each other.
Btw, judging Nazi Germany for the Holocaust while celebrating Columbus Day? You don't know how bad you look right now. XDD
Legally, do they belong there, "many" of them have been sentenced by a jury or judge; though often not with a jury thanks to aggressive plea bargaining.
Do the prisons also have a legal obligation to protect prisoners from undue harm like rape?
But it also points to issues in our legal system. When the per capita number of warrants in Ferguson is > 1.5. When 3 strike laws and mandatory minimums lead to life in prison for non-violent offenders.
But also, if 4% of death row inmates are innocent; do we suppose that number is higher or lower for lesser sentences? for those that took plea deals? For those where the police have been corrupt.
I've done over 10 years in state and federal prisons. Reading your extensive comments on prison conditions in this forum for US Steel idling their plants has me wondering if you are an activist for prison reform or an ex-con with an axe to grind.
After reading the linked article i don't think the two are anything comparable. Too little food, cramped cells, people taking turns to sleep, not being allowed to talk with each other, being led to toilet at the set time with whole cell, injections that cause depression and chemical castration, being forced to call to wife and tell that you have a new family and won't be coming back, rape (though only for those whom guards like)... Of course number of prisoners in USA is larger than it should be and they need better protection (mainly from other prisoners), but it is not in a same class as this reeducation camps.
I don't understand why some people in US so desperately want to claim the first place in human right violations. Do you believe "Chemical castration for certain child molesters" is comparable to mass injections of huge number of people whose only guilt is having whatsapp on the phone, or not speaking Chinese, or having a beard, or not drinking alcohol? Is low quality food comparable with getting small piece of rice dough the whole day? The way US treated prisoners in Guantanamo is probably comparable to the situation in china, but normal prison are not.
I think it is important to keep the sense of proportion, things can be bad and require urgent action without being the worst. And saying things like: Trump is Hitler or human right violations in US are comparable to China do not help anyone. It just downplays the seriousness of the worst case and make the bad case look good.
I replied to this thread to say that the U.S. has little high ground to sanction China on the way it treats its prisoners and population based on incarceration rates.
We aren't the worst for human rights violations. But, it's not acceptable that sexual assault is a legitimate threat to the extent that it's the butt of every prison joke.
We don't have to be the worst to realize we need to fix our problems; but there are clearly people in this thread that are unaware of the issues.
I agree with the parent that the issues you show are not comparable with what is happening in china. Of course US as a country did many wrong things, for instance the treatment of native Indian people in 1800s was directly comparable to what is happening in china now.
But the bad things a country did do not reduce its right of truthfully pointing out bad things other countries are doing.
The news articles I posted are from the last 2 years not 200 years ago. The Alabama chemical castration went on the books a few weeks ago.
And why are you going back 200 years? Internment camps happened in the 40s and forced sterilization + syphylis guided as experiments happened into the 1980s... To free people, citizens even.
No; which is why I phrased it the way I did. This doesn't change the perception though because the U.S. stands out in the developed world of numbers we can trust.
It's a fine sentiment. The american government needs to balance the need to protect chinese citizens (and other ones under influence from China) vs. the economic needs of americans, who are the government's primary responsibility.
The problem is that american citizens and businesses are heavily dependent on one specific source of imports -China- with little to no alternatives on certain goods [1]. It's a good long term aim to diversity the imports, but it needs to be done gradually, allowing sufficient time for american economy to adjust. Attempting to do that in one fell swoop would cause a lot of disruption and economic hardships to american citizenry.
Once the key imports are diversified, US will have much more room to put pressure on China, to curb their humanitarian abuses.
[1] China also holds a significant share of US bonds
I think this problem could be traced back Clinton pushing for WTO admittance for China without conditions, IIRC the next Dalai Lama had already been seized by this time and the crack down/Han flood into Tibet was under way. I remember someone writing the West always falls for the promise of this huge Chinese market in exchange for normalizing trade and China changing after the people see what the world has to offer, but there's almost no evidence for this.
> the West always falls for the promise of this huge Chinese market
Historically, the only thing that the West was ever able to successfully import into China was opium, and even that was a small window before native production became cheaper than shipping it all the way from India or Turkey. Over the long haul, China has had millenia-long trade surpluses, to the point that Roman writers were complaining about the trade through the Red Sea in spices and silks siphoning off their gold and silver, and later on so much of the silver of Mexico and Potosi ending up in China that it destabilized their bimetallic currency system.
This may seem unrelated, but if China was willing to worsen its relations with the US, and introduce tarifs punishing its own economy, it should have done it as sanctions against the horrible things the US does to people in its prisons. Stories told by blacks who were released from prisons in the US are terrifying, and China is one of the few countries that could actually help.
What is happening in China is an abomination, and political pressure is necessary. However the US should expect to be held to the same standards when applying political pressure, and it needs to resolve its own problems too.
These are two analogous issues by major world powers that don't validate each other and can both be addressed. This is a great perspective on a different issue but doesn't pose solutions, thoughts, or further information on the issue in the parent comment.
Think less "all lives matter" and more walk and chew gum at the same time.
Mirroring the sentence sure looks cool and makes the two situations look so equal, but any US citizen is free to criticize US prisons, and free to find information about them. This is very different from China which desperately tries to hide the fact of existence of this concentration camps. Anyone who tries to talk about this in China ends up in Chinese prison (which is separate from this camps and worse than US prison). All the people who were released were threatened to not talk about camps, people living in cities near camps have malware installed on their phones to not be able to talk with anyone outside their cities.
China condemning US won't change anything because the situation in US is the way it is because the people know and do not care enough about the issue. US condemning China would help because China tries to hide the truth from its own citizens who believe the camps are kind of schools where people learn history and get rid of religious superstitions.
By putting the false equivalence sign between these two situations you do disservice to both causes.
I don't think any US prison can be compared to what they are doing to Uighurs. China is a huge country, and it's not a trivial issue just because of their size. There are still millions of Uighurs being sent to concentration camps for their ethnicity/religion
I think it's pretty clear that for the tariffs to work you have to play a long game. It's not like the capacity is there immediately so it needs to be built up slowly. and it will only be built up if the investors have confidence that the tariffs will still be in place once they built up the capacity.
If I had a company I would be very hesitant to build up US capacity because there is a good chance the tariffs will be removed again soon. I think right now everything is in limbo which is not good for anybody.
If plans for diversifying supply and finding alternative markets for goods impacted by retaliatory tariffs had happened first, much of the short term impact of what are basically import taxes passed to consumers could be assuaged or limited like if Apple had built alternative supply chains. However, we have lost long term markets for goods like soy beans that will take years to recover (see the farm bailouts pushed by the current administration to cover these costs) while not hedging against other short term losses or even building the increase in taxes into a credit so citizens see a net 0 from the tariffs.
Tariffs can be influential in trade negotiation but must be used like a scalpel, skillfully restricting trade in areas that don't cripple domestic industry while pressuring the other economy. this is incredibly difficult against such a large trading partner as China without building up alternative supply of goods or shoring up domestic capacity first. Blanket Tariffs, unless against a small country with small or specific exports, will hurt everyone involved much more than an existing deal. Meanwhile, promises of future gains from a new deal are just that, promises by politicians who already have the largest record of lying to the public and blocking any transparency like in the documented obstruction of the special counsel investigation. Usually, the costs are never made up by future gains and promises fall short if reveal themselves at all.
For steel, it may be that different countries have taken to what they can make the most profit from, diversifying production globally to meet demand. Domestic industry compensates for foreign competition by either doing it better/cheap/more profitable or specializing in ways that competitors can't like massive production of cheap steel foreign competition can't match touch due to high shipping costs or developing and producing a specialty steel that nobody else can match. If this specialization moves to an extreme so one type isn't made domestically at all, that's going to hit consumers and industry hard. It will take time to increase capacity or shift production, potentially away from more profitable and established goods, to meet demand. That lapse in supply could be huge, give US companies a cheap way into that market, but at the cost of further government intervention, higher taxes, and a step away from capitalism which allowed countries to specialize and decrease costs long term. In this example, that supply drop opened an opportunity to other countries like Russia who are conveniently dropping millions on a project in Kentucky. If US steel can't compensate and foreign groups are able to push into the domestic market anyway, what does the tariff do to help domestic industry at all?
We are in limbo then, with goods sitting around or being taxed higher to hopefully get a better deal than what exists. If that falls through, we are all much worse off from all this.
These tariffs are such a terrible idea. Not only does it hurt US manufacturing which has to pay for more expensive steel, lowering the competitiveness of US goods (and thus steel demand!) It also isn't guaranteed to help US steel manufacturing because the tariffs are only targeting China.
We could easily be in a situation where we're paying more for Japanese steel (for example) with not much benefit to US steel workers.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadhttps://agmetalminer.com/2019/06/19/this-morning-in-metals-u...
"We are idling two blast furnaces in the United States and one blast furnace in Europe to better align our global production with our order book."
Not true at all. Agriculture, semiconductors, consumer electronics, and automotive are examples of other industries tariffs are designed to benefit. Steel is one of many.
They all benefit from tariffs. Further, by acting collectively it’s easier to get your own pork spending when you support others pork spending.
Get several groups who care a lot about their own issues and little for each other’s issues, and you can push polices that most people disagree with. Of course you need to be carful as alliances pool both support and opposition.
The tariffs were designed to hurt agriculture, or at least treat it as acceptable collateral damage. It was obvious the Chinese would retaliate by targeting US farmers, and then they did.
How is automotive supposed to benefit from tariffs against Mexico, which the industry heavily relies upon?
How do consumer electronics benefit from tariffs on Chinese electronics components when the tariffs simply force production to other non-US countries (where production plants are already ramped up)? Note that the tariffs on Chines components mean that US assembled consumer devices get taxed at 25%, but foreign (non Chinese) assemblers don’t.
Semiconductors are mostly made in the US, Japan, and South Korea. How do tariffs on Chinese goods help shore up US dominance there?
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/all-about-the-semiconduc...
Since Florida is a 'swing state', this will never change.
That’s currently less relevant at industrial scales where corn is a fine substitute even if it’s a slightly different chemical and not granular.
Same way that the decision of the "Party Central Committee" of The People's Republic of China to block Google helped Baidu.
China started this. 10 years later we're just now joining the fight.
If that's not tipping the scale, I don't know what is.
https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/04/golden-shield-proj...
Where did you get that timeframe from? I clearly remember the 2002 steel tariffs under the George W Bush administration [0]. The US' own research into that estimated the impact as:
"ranged between a gain of $65.6 million (0.0006% of GDP) to a loss of $110.0 million (0.0011% of GDP), "with a central estimate of a welfare loss of $41.6 million."
You're making it sound like the US has been this free-trade vanguard while the rest of the world ran rougshod over its principled nature.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_United_States_steel_tarif...
So. pretty trivial stuff.
You're making it sound like the US has been this free-trade vanguard
check : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tariff_ra...
U.S. is 161 out of 180 (180=lowest). So we are the leader of the free trade vanguard as far as large countries go.
I apologize "for making it sound like". That was not my intention. Perhaps you were eager to read that into it.
The reason every round of WTO trade talks takes years to complete is because of the dispute between rich world farmers and poor-world farmers. It's not just the US, but also the EU and their Common Agricultural Policy that leads to overproduction, waste and export of surpluses to poor countries at below market prices.
[0]https://outline.com/VB9gCX (link to a 2015 Economist article)
So yes, it's related to global demand -- global demand that went on a primary rollercoaster ride triggered by tariffs. And the news media is rightfully blaming the 1 person (not even party, singular person) for the consequences of their actions. What a sordid state of affairs indeed.
“In response to current market conditions, we are taking actions aligned with our strategy by adjusting our global blast furnace footprint,” the steelmaker said in a release.
Hmmm, I wonder what those "current market conditions" could possibly be? Also from the link you posted:
As the U.S. and China move toward a resumption of trade talks this month, China has lowered its tariff rates for some other countries, CNBC reported citing an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
...
Last month, the U.S. raised tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese products, to which China responded with tariffs on $60 billion in U.S. goods.
The classic example is what meat to buy for dinner: beef has gotten expensive, so it's time to grab the chicken or pork this week. Your choice to choose an alternative to beef will help bring the price back down. We could take the example further to other people's choices, the butcher's response to reduced demand, etc, but we'll stop with: the economy is vastly complex, and all changes in conditions produce complex responses.
https://wonderfulloaf.org/
(Horribly busted on Firefox :( )
If that is still the case, then demand for US steel is determined by infrastructure investment, not trade.
If you need nice steel, or nice case iron, the Chinese material is bad. You can't really grind any chinese cast iron that I have seen precisely, and none of the steel that I've seen from there has been clean or dimensionally accurate. For most uses, that doesn't matter, and it is totally fine. The European and American tool steel is FAR FAR better than anything that I've seen from china. I tend not to use chinese HSS for steel, since it breaks so easily.
Source: taking a break from machining steel on a bridgeport
But it is interesting to hear that quality does differ region to region based on the local needs. Again, that makes the case that imported steel vs domestic steel isn't a clear cut issue if proximity matters.
Precisely.
In the knife world, many (dare I say most) of the best tool steels used for knife making are made by Crucible Industries, a US company.
For example, the dominant steel used to make knives for bladesports[1][2] is CPM M4.
___
[1] http://www.bladesports.org/WP/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkemT5ciBnw
But hey if you can get those votes in swing districts thats all that matters in the end. A few thousand steelworker votes are more important than all votes in California for POTUS2020 so expect more of the same.
I hope you appreciate that this is a very disingenuous argument. the Californian voters would get a lot more attention if they didn't all vote the same way every time.
>The US steel near me is generally higher quality than the chinese steel around here
While this may seem contradictory, it's perfectly natural on an open market.
There's always some demand for cheap, low quality steel and also some demand for the expensive, high quality steel. Knocking together a bookshelf has much different requirements than building a car; the economy needs both.
For the low quality, cheap steel, transportation costs would constitute a higher fraction of cost than for high quality, expensive one. Thus it makes sense to buy the low quality locally, while importing the high quality from far away - where the low q would not be cheap enough due to the transportation. Nonetheless the US has enough of know-how and infrastructure to produce high quality materials whenever there's enough demand.
I firmly believe the current round of tariffs are primarily a geopolitical tool - aimed mostly at imports from China, to help with geopolitical negotiations and also encourage diversification of import sources. Likewise with the recent kerfuffle with Mexico - where the proposed tariffs were used to entice them to handle the immigration crisis. To the boot, the article emphasizes the effect is not really protectionist.
For example, US agriculture like soy beans lost the China market, but China has alternatives able to pick up capacity like from Brazil. Soy Beans aren't a highly refined or engineered product, just a crop that can be grown in bulk in many places around the world. Although the tariffs may now be pushing Apple to source for other countries, there is no in place alternative for a refined, highly engineered good like an iPhone. Short term Apple is hit hard and long term may move to be impacted less, but at the end of the day consumers see higher costs due to the import tax and long term price increases as Apple has to make back their investment in a diversified supply chain. Meanwhile, Us farmers won't get that soy bean market back for many years which will have serious repercussions in that industry.
As a geopolitical tool for trade negotiation a tariff is not great, especially if misused or over used. In this case, targeted tariffs could be an extra straw on top of negotiations to push through a final deal or late stage negotiation. Instead it has been a hammer/nail situation without complexity. Think of it more as the flashy dinner with open bar to seal the deal and less a first time around the table tactic. With the Mexico tariff being a bluff given Mexico had already agreed to discuss or take actions before the tweet was even made, it is feasible the current administration could be smarter about their trade policies or at least try to add nuance to benefit their cards in negotiations. There are better ways of getting someone to the table namely targeted sanctions that don't tax you own citizens or wipe out agricultural exports. As others have said here, there is more than enough material to impose sanctions in many sectors like stolen IP/technologies, human rights violations and concerns, military posturing, and more. Simplifying trade negotiation to tariff this and tariff that is not only a poor tool and negotiation tactic but also damaging to our economy, directly and in the short and long term. We come out behind pretty much regardless of what deal is made, if any.
Only in the pathological case when most or all imports of the particular good is under the tariffs.
Just for sake of example, suppose for a second America had diversified source of steel; four distinct countries each supplying about 25% of imports. Suppose a tariff was laid on the Chinese imports only. Would the prices of other imports move up? A bit, but much, much less than the tariff. Competition does wonders.
OTOH, if the only significant source of imports is from China -as is the case right now- well yes, in that case the americans will end up paying. Luckily this also creates positive pressure to diversify sources - which in a longer run will make imports much more competitively priced. Doubly luckily, the money raised on tariffs goes into the governmental budget, which means it gets spent back into the american economy anyway (minus the inefficiency of the government).
For now. Post Brexit that may be a completely different story. It is hard for me to imagine Europe without the single market and its advantages, I recently ordered something from Japan and it has been held up in customs for weeks now.
We're going to be living with the clusterfuck for a long time, one way or another.
India is extremely protectionist with steel, but even it, with its own construction boom going on, gets overflown with semi-legally imported Chinese steel.
[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...
Btw, judging Nazi Germany for the Holocaust while celebrating Columbus Day? You don't know how bad you look right now. XDD
Legally, do they belong there, "many" of them have been sentenced by a jury or judge; though often not with a jury thanks to aggressive plea bargaining.
Do the prisons also have a legal obligation to protect prisoners from undue harm like rape?
But it also points to issues in our legal system. When the per capita number of warrants in Ferguson is > 1.5. When 3 strike laws and mandatory minimums lead to life in prison for non-violent offenders.
But also, if 4% of death row inmates are innocent; do we suppose that number is higher or lower for lesser sentences? for those that took plea deals? For those where the police have been corrupt.
https://www.newsweek.com/one-25-executed-us-innocent-study-c...
Little and low quality food so that sheriffs could take the money https://www.al.com/opinion/2018/03/49_alabama_sheriffs_flout...
Widespread prison rape https://www.hrw.org/news/2007/12/15/us-federal-statistics-sh...
Prisons under staffed and over crowded https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-07-26/...
Widespread use of solitary confinement https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-usa/2019/04/20/solitary-co...
Chemical Castration in at least 8 states https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alabama-passes-bill-requiri...
I think it is important to keep the sense of proportion, things can be bad and require urgent action without being the worst. And saying things like: Trump is Hitler or human right violations in US are comparable to China do not help anyone. It just downplays the seriousness of the worst case and make the bad case look good.
China isn't waging war all over the world, so America is the worst case scenario right now.
We aren't the worst for human rights violations. But, it's not acceptable that sexual assault is a legitimate threat to the extent that it's the butt of every prison joke.
We don't have to be the worst to realize we need to fix our problems; but there are clearly people in this thread that are unaware of the issues.
But the bad things a country did do not reduce its right of truthfully pointing out bad things other countries are doing.
And why are you going back 200 years? Internment camps happened in the 40s and forced sterilization + syphylis guided as experiments happened into the 1980s... To free people, citizens even.
No; which is why I phrased it the way I did. This doesn't change the perception though because the U.S. stands out in the developed world of numbers we can trust.
The problem is that american citizens and businesses are heavily dependent on one specific source of imports -China- with little to no alternatives on certain goods [1]. It's a good long term aim to diversity the imports, but it needs to be done gradually, allowing sufficient time for american economy to adjust. Attempting to do that in one fell swoop would cause a lot of disruption and economic hardships to american citizenry.
Once the key imports are diversified, US will have much more room to put pressure on China, to curb their humanitarian abuses.
[1] China also holds a significant share of US bonds
As an American, I'd be willing to pay more for goods if it meant Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims and other folks in China had basic human rights.
‘Cheap stuff now, environmental disaster later’
Historically, the only thing that the West was ever able to successfully import into China was opium, and even that was a small window before native production became cheaper than shipping it all the way from India or Turkey. Over the long haul, China has had millenia-long trade surpluses, to the point that Roman writers were complaining about the trade through the Red Sea in spices and silks siphoning off their gold and silver, and later on so much of the silver of Mexico and Potosi ending up in China that it destabilized their bimetallic currency system.
https://chinatribunal.com/about-etac/
* The US imprisons 4 times as many people than China per capita https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarce...
* Xinjiang Accounts for 21% of prison arrests
* The US has 2 million people in prison http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/uk/06/prisons/html/nn2...
What is happening in China is an abomination, and political pressure is necessary. However the US should expect to be held to the same standards when applying political pressure, and it needs to resolve its own problems too.
Think less "all lives matter" and more walk and chew gum at the same time.
China condemning US won't change anything because the situation in US is the way it is because the people know and do not care enough about the issue. US condemning China would help because China tries to hide the truth from its own citizens who believe the camps are kind of schools where people learn history and get rid of religious superstitions.
By putting the false equivalence sign between these two situations you do disservice to both causes.
However if we look at percentage of population jailed for any reason, the US looks atrocious.
* The US has about 400,000 people jailed on remand, i.e. they have been accused of a crime but haven't made it to trial.
* About 1 in 6 of the black population is in jail (by my envelope calculation).
* 3 in 10 state prisoners developed symptoms of mental illness (with no recent history of mental illness).
Yes, US prisoners are not political prisoners.
Selecting "political prisoners" as the only category that deserves political pressure seems wrong to me.
If I had a company I would be very hesitant to build up US capacity because there is a good chance the tariffs will be removed again soon. I think right now everything is in limbo which is not good for anybody.
Tariffs can be influential in trade negotiation but must be used like a scalpel, skillfully restricting trade in areas that don't cripple domestic industry while pressuring the other economy. this is incredibly difficult against such a large trading partner as China without building up alternative supply of goods or shoring up domestic capacity first. Blanket Tariffs, unless against a small country with small or specific exports, will hurt everyone involved much more than an existing deal. Meanwhile, promises of future gains from a new deal are just that, promises by politicians who already have the largest record of lying to the public and blocking any transparency like in the documented obstruction of the special counsel investigation. Usually, the costs are never made up by future gains and promises fall short if reveal themselves at all.
For steel, it may be that different countries have taken to what they can make the most profit from, diversifying production globally to meet demand. Domestic industry compensates for foreign competition by either doing it better/cheap/more profitable or specializing in ways that competitors can't like massive production of cheap steel foreign competition can't match touch due to high shipping costs or developing and producing a specialty steel that nobody else can match. If this specialization moves to an extreme so one type isn't made domestically at all, that's going to hit consumers and industry hard. It will take time to increase capacity or shift production, potentially away from more profitable and established goods, to meet demand. That lapse in supply could be huge, give US companies a cheap way into that market, but at the cost of further government intervention, higher taxes, and a step away from capitalism which allowed countries to specialize and decrease costs long term. In this example, that supply drop opened an opportunity to other countries like Russia who are conveniently dropping millions on a project in Kentucky. If US steel can't compensate and foreign groups are able to push into the domestic market anyway, what does the tariff do to help domestic industry at all?
We are in limbo then, with goods sitting around or being taxed higher to hopefully get a better deal than what exists. If that falls through, we are all much worse off from all this.
We could easily be in a situation where we're paying more for Japanese steel (for example) with not much benefit to US steel workers.