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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: craig crawford who wrote (21296)	3/13/2002 6:04:22 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

tariffs don't need to be imposed to save every job in an industry. tariffs should make the playing field level. with a level playing field i'm sure we will be able to compete just fine. Level playing field? I doubt that the Unions or the industries really want that. They would like a situation where the US can maintain aritficially high wages in fields in which it is no longer the most productive. That is the part that protectionists rarely talk about. We are no longer the most efficient producers of textiles, steel, or a variety of other goods (like TV's). i simply do not believe almost 50,000 jobs in the last two years and nearly three dozen bankruptcies in the steel industry had anything to do with inefficiencies. i believe it is a result of protectionist policies on the part of our foreign competitors, who benefit from devaluing their currencies and who dump product below the cost of production in an attempt to try to export their way out of financial difficulties. Jobs are lost everyday. They are created in other industries. It is part of capitalism. If you began raising a trade war with the rest of the world, you would simply transfer jobs from efficient industries (like high-tech) to less efficient industries (like steel and textiles). Personally, I would rather see Intel and Microsoft be the US's largest companies than Nucor. tariffs oftentimes do result in higher prices for consumers. but they also should be implemented in conjunction with a lowering of income taxes--putting more money in the pockets of consumers so they can afford the higher prices. That's an interesting suggestion....and if you are going to raise tariffs, I would probably agree with it. However, you would actually need to lower taxes by more than the incoming tariffs. You would need to compensate for the increased revenue that domestic companies are seeing as a result of the tax on US consumers. One of the problems with tariffs is that they NEVER end. I'm reading a book on the Civil War that is talking about how the iron industry (heavily used for railroads) was screaming for tariffs in the late 1850's. They were worried about British industrials undercutting their prices. Slacker