I talked earlier this week about Trump's Trade War™ with China and what it meant to Ohio, and Greg Sargent at the Washington Post backs up the general notion that Trump country voters are the ones who will pay first.
According to multiple reports, people in agricultural communities are on edge over President Trump’s trade war with China. Now that China has retaliated against Trump’s tariffs by announcing its own tariffs on more than 100 American products, fears of a serious escalation are becoming more real by the moment, with stocks sliding and companies registering their objections over Trump’s actions to the White House.
New data supplied to me by the Brookings Institution show that agricultural communities are right to worry about what’s happening. But that’s not all: The data also show that other targeted industries should be worried as well. And it reveals that those who are vulnerable to negative impacts from these trade tensions are mostly concentrated in counties carried by Trump, though a lot of them are in counties carried by Hillary Clinton as well.
The Brookings data constitute a granular geographic look at what Trump’s trade war with China might mean. It breaks down the numbers of jobs in the seven industries producing the products targeted by China’s retaliatory actions, which include fresh and dried fruit and nut farming, stainless steel pipes, pork products, modified ethanol, scrap aluminum and wineries.
It's gonna hurt rural voters the most, period. Not all are in Trump states, but a lot did vote for him.
The Brookings analysis — which is based on proprietary EMSI and Bureau of Labor Statistics data — shows that the largest sum of vulnerable jobs is in fruit and nut farming, with the majority concentrated in Trump counties. Most of the jobs in hog and pig farming and pipe production are also concentrated in Trump country. It’s only in wineries where Clinton counties have the most jobs.
Trump has flatly dismissed any worries over an escalation, claiming that trade wars are “easy to win” even as he rails nonsensically about trade deficits as a form of national humiliation. Trump views his tariffs as weapons in a zero-sum struggle for dominance, with little regard to the real world impact such a battle could have.
The big losers: rural Oregon and Washington State, Iowa, Michigan's lake counties, and California wine country.
But remember, that was the $3 billion in tariffs the Chinese announced on Monday. Today, the Chinese went all in with $50 billion in tariffs to call Trump's bluff once again.
China said it would levy an additional 25 percent tariff on imports of 106 U.S. products including soybeans, automobiles, chemicals and aircraft, in response to proposed American duties on its high-tech goods.
Matching the scale of proposed U.S. tariffs announced the previous day, the Ministry of Commerce in Beijing said the charges will apply to around $50 billion of U.S. imports. Officials signaled that the implementation of the proposed measures will depend on when the U.S. applies its own after a period of public consultation.
The step ratchets up tension in a brewing trade war between the world’s two largest trading nations, with the Trump administration’s latest offensive based on alleged infringements of intellectual property in China. In targeting high-tech sectors that Beijing is openly trying to promote, the U.S. has provoked furious rhetoric from Beijing and stronger threats of retaliation than many had anticipated.
"China’s response was tougher than what the market was expecting -- investors didn’t foresee the country levying additional tariffs on sensitive and important products such as soybeans and airplanes," said Gao Qi, Singapore-based strategist at Scotiabank. "Investors believe a trade war will hurt both countries and their economies eventually."
More tariffs on both sides are coming. Remember: Trump wants to eliminate nearly all of our $110 billion yearly trade deficit with China. That's a lot of exports that will be harmed, and if you think inflation and the retail apocalypse is an issue now, wait until we're paying 25% higher prices on $50 billion plus in Chinese goods.
Bunker up, folks. The economic disaster is coming. If these tariffs go into effect on both sides, a lot of US jobs will go away in 2018, and it'll only be the beginning.
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