To help digest all this current brouhaha concerning tariffs, the following is a review America’s use of tariffs and the Left’s changing voiced agreement and disagreement with tariffs.
This from frontpagemag.com.
More recently:
– In 1993, the House Left voted against NAFTA by 156-102 and against it in the Senate by a narrower 28-27. Now, they publicly mourn the death of what they claim is the last vestige of NAFTA;
– President Trump’s tariffs, they claim, are killing the ‘free trade’ that [they] once opposed, before they supported it, and before they opposed it;
– NAFTA cost Republicans the White House, but Bill Clinton’s embrace of it cost [the Left] the South. Clinton had manipulated and misled the working-class [Left] into believing he would either reject or fundamentally transform NAFTA and lost the white working-class vote;
– Sen. Chuck Schumer, then a mere member of Congress, had originally voted against NAFTA; and
– When President Trump proposed replacing NAFTA with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Schumer praised the move but still like then Sen. [What’s-Her-Name], voted against it because it didn’t do enough for global warming.
Sen. Schumer now vows:
We’re going to fight these tariffs tooth and nail.
Please, New Yorkers vote this worthless asshat out of office.
This is the same Schumer who has spent years berating Canada for ‘restrictive trade policies.’
Another real doozy, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (C/G-CT) built her reputation on fighting NAFTA. She recalled six years ago:
I put my heart and soul into defeating this. We were on the floor every morning, every night.
DeLauro now argues:
President Trump’s trade war on Canada and Mexico, which are part of the USMCA trade agreement, driven by his 25% tariff on nearly all imports from those countries, will drive up prices on all Americans.
I condemn President Trump launching a trade war that absolutely guarantees price increases on key products as well as retaliatory tariffs that will affect exporters across many states.
The communists/globalists supported and implemented tariffs from the very beginning.
From Jefferson’s Embargo Act to Madison’s Tariff of 1816, formed in response to British economic warfare closely resembling that of modern-day China, not only the Founding Fathers and Framers of the Constitution, but key figures in the Democratic Republican Party knew the value of tariffs.
American independence required economic leverage.
The idea the world was one big free market with no regard to borders or national interests was fanciful nonsense which they would for the most part have rejected out of hand. The debate was concerned on which parts of the country would benefit from tariffs and which parts of the country would be harmed by them. [Not whether or not to tariff.]
When the Left ‘internationalized’ under Woodrow Wilson and FDR, they fully embraced free trade. The dismantling of tariffs in the 1930s became a signature part of FDR’s global agenda, seizing control of tariffs (perhaps unconstitutionally) from Congress and using it as an instrument of both domestic and foreign policy is one of the unresolved crises of the New Deal.
NOTE: Today the Left is vociferously complaining about President Trump using a power they gave FDR.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, [the Left] viewed free trade as an anti-capitalist program for fighting ‘trusts’ and ‘bosses’ by using ‘free trade’ to weaken American companies.
Tariffs were supposed to be an instrument of the rich and removing them was alleged to help the poor. The package of taking down tariffs and putting up taxes was economic class warfare. At least it was until major corporations embraced it and used it to ship production overseas.
In reality, dismantling tariffs centralized government power which is why the Revenue Act of 1894 under President Grover Cleveland, one of the country’s worst presidents, also gave us the first non-war income tax.
Dismantling tariffs required imposing taxes which then had to be struck down by the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Company.
It would take an alliance of Democrats and Progressives to impose taxes through the Sixteenth Amendment.
Why was there a sudden need for an income tax amendment in 1913? Later that year, the Left passed the Tariff Act of 1913, slashing tariffs and adding a corporate tax.
Among [the Left and the Right] opposition to tariffs was wedded to a program of tax hikes and class warfare. Cheap foreign goods were tied to higher taxes on the ‘rich’.
But despite the class warfare rhetoric, too many people in democrat constituencies were hurt by dismantling tariffs.
[Leftists] supported those tariffs that they believed aided the ‘working class’ as they defined it and opposed those that they believed benefited American corporations.
Class warfare indeed:
– [T]ariffs like LBJ’s retaliatory ‘Chicken Tax’ appealed to key political demographics,
– Bill Clinton’s NAFTA doubletalk showed how popular tariffs still were with the Democrat base,
– [A] generation of [Leftists] ran against NAFTA and denounced it as a tool of economic destruction, and
– By the late 90s, [L]eftists rioted in the streets of major cities against free trade.
Those on the Left who supported NAFTA and free trade learned to be careful about their views.
Now the Left acts like they are the greatest supporters of free trade and the greatest opponents of tariffs.
However, in reality:
– [T]heir policy on tariffs and trade have been linked to some form of class warfare for at least the last 130 years, and
– Their opposition to President Trump’s efforts to roll back tariffs worldwide rings hollow.
Keep in mind too, Trump’s Liberation Day program is a more aggressive version of FDR’s Reciprocal Tariff Act that emphasizes the stick over the carrot.
Rather than attempting to lower foreign tariffs through a mass series of reciprocal deals, Trump is trying to lower them with mass retaliatory tariffs. That may or may not work, but [the Left] should stop pretending they’re either pragmatically or ideologically opposed to them.
Final thoughts: When searching for sense in what the elected communists/globalists do, We the People must re-ground ourselves in the knowledge that leftists are not born-again free-traders, rather born-again traitors; they are not enemies of tariffs, rather enemies of America.
