There is already a trade war and we are losing it. The idea that putting a tariff on a product will further incite a trade war when a trade war already exists id foolishness. Once a company or corporation that manufactures a product overseas and imported into this country sees the cost of that product rising to more than it would cost to manufacture in this country, those companies and corporations will then build their manufacturing plants here instead of in Mexico or China. If Ford insists upon manufacturing their vehicles in Mexico, then Americans will cease buying Ford products when the costs of Ford products rise above that of American manufactured autos and trucks.
yup ..
last year, anti dumping tariff's were put in place ..
According to a report released Tuesday by the US Department Of Commerce,
corrosion-resistant steel imports from China were sold at unfairly low prices and will be taxed at 256 percent.
The measure is clearly aimed exclusively at China's dumping of steel on the US market, and its relentess exports of deflation.
According to
Bloomberg, imports from India, South Korea and Italy will be taxed at lower rates. Imports from Taiwan and Italy’s Marcegaglia SpA will not face anti-dumping tariffs. The government found dumping margins of 3.25 percent for most South Korean steel imports, with Hyundai Steel Co.’s shipments subject to duties of 3.5 percent. Imports from Italian companies excluding Marcegaglia will be taxed at 3.1 percent. Indian imports are subject to duties from 6.6 percent to 6.9 percent.
Which means that the biggest "beneficiary" of this dramatic import price surge will be none other than Beijing.
“We’re concerned that the dumping that’s occurring is at higher levels than these determinations reflect,” Tim Brightbill, a partner at Wiley Rein LLP, a law firm representing U.S. steelmaker Nucor Corp., said Tuesday in an interview. “We have serious concerns that these preliminary duties are not enough at a time when unfairly priced imports continue to surge into the U.S. market at unprecedented rates.”
According to some the US foray into trade wars was long overdue:
U.S. producers including Nucor, U.S. Steel Corp. and Steel Dynamics Inc. filed cases in June alleging that some products from China, India, Italy, South Korea and Taiwan
had been dumped in the U.S., harming domestic companies.
In November, the government found that all those countries, except Taiwan, subsidized their domestic production by as much as 236 percent of its price.
The tarfiff hike comes on the heels of a previous announcement from November 3, which saw countervailing duties as high as 236%. Together these create a barrier to imports of these steel products from China, said Caitlin Webber, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence in Washington.
Trump must have read about it, and decided to include it in his rally speeches ..