Don’t believe Biden or Trump – tariffs don’t protect jobs

Both Trump and Biden imposed high tariffs on imported products made in China and other countries. Those impositions broke with and departed from the previous half century’s policies favoring “free trade” (less or minimal government intervention in international markets).

Free trade policies facilitated “globalization,” the euphemism for the post-1970 surge in US corporations’ investing abroad: producing and distributing there, re-locating operations there, and merging with foreign enterprises there.

Presidents before Trump had insisted that free trade plus globalization best served US interests. Both Democratic and Republican administrations had enthusiastically endorsed that insistence. Dutifully performing ideological support duties, they stressed how globalization’s benefits to US corporations would “trickle down” to the rest of us.

Globalizing US corporations used portions of their profits to reward both parties with donations and other electoral and lobbying supports.

Our last two presidents reversed that position. Against free trade they favored multiple government interventions in international trade, especially imposing and raising tariffs. Instead of advocating free trade and globalization, they promoted economic nationalism.

Like their predecessors, Trump and Biden depended on financial support from corporate America as well as votes from the employee class. Many US corporations and those they enriched had shifted their profit expectations in response to the competition they faced from new, powerful non-US firms.

The latter had emerged during the free-trade/globalization conditions after 1970, above all in China. US firms increasingly welcomed or demanded protection from those competitors. Accordingly,