It might be attractive to protect local industries, but to stifle free trade is to stifle progress and economic growth — two of the focal points of this year’s election. As both candidates promise an America rich in jobs, they fail to articulate to the American public the economic realities of their anti-free-trade agendas, which will only serve to undermine the economy and workforce, not benefit them.
Donald Trump’s platform formed its foundations on anti-globalization early on under the promise of keeping out Mexican immigrants and putting an end to Chinese trade. Hillary Clinton followed suit last October by revoking her support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is less radical than Trump but worrying nonetheless. Yet rather than addressing the ramifications of such proposals in the last two presidential debates, the candidates have continued to prioritize pillorying each other’s private lives.
It’s time the realities of globalization are brought to light, lest the U.S. suffer steep economic consequences down the road.
To examine the effects of globalization in America is to look to two places: the household and the Rustbelt. The fact that Americans are able to enjoy more goods at lower costs is the result of globalization; competition and lower labor inputs have allowed foreign firms that produce more efficiently to make our computers, cars and endless other products that comprise the average American home. In the same manner, hundreds of millions of people around the world benefit from access to American exports.
But to some Americans, these arguments don’t matter. Trump’s anti-free-trade rhetoric falls on eager ears across the expanse of ailing industrial America. As industries naturally flowed to areas of lower production costs, these towns saw their plants close doors to head south and across the Pacific. Try explaining to the ex-factory worker whose family worked in the steel industry for four decades how the exportation of his town’s jobs has been beneficial for him.
The merits of globalization, which come chiefly in enjoying lower prices, are not as easily seen as the highly concentrated negative outcomes, substantial only in aggregating the total consumers saved. These workers represent those who do lose out on globalization; although both sides of trade enjoy the benefits of lower cost goods, some workers will lose jobs as the resources that employ them flow into other industries.
The anti-tax Trump belies levying harsh tariffs as the key to bringing back jobs to the States. Not only would Trump’s plan raise prices for American businesses and consumers that use foreign goods, forcing businesses to cut employment, but it would also cripple American export firms as foreign nations raise tariffs against American goods in retaliation.
Recent analyses from Moody’s Analytics predict that once Trump realizes his anti-free-trade crusade, Americans can expect 4 million fewer jobs and an unemployment rate rounding seven percent due to his high tariff policies, among other proposals. The projected exorbitant tariffs against Mexican and Chinese imports — 35 and 45 percent, respectively — would do Trump’s bidding, plunging both nations into recession, but not without bringing the stars and stripes down with them. Donald Trump is the schoolyard bully that declares if his team can’t win, then no one gets to play.
In June 2016, he disparaged globalization in the deceptively titled speech “Declaring American Economic Independence,” as if such a thing was remotely feasible or beneficial to our standard of living. The global economy has developed — and should continue to do so — bidding in such a manner that economies are carefully intertwined, specializing in the goods in which they have an advantage. Immediately withdrawing from globalization would disastrously reverse the role it has played in driving economic growth since the second world war.
The key to Trump’s demagogy in these speeches are statements without explanation. He claimed Hillary Clinton was waging “a trade war against the American worker” through agreements such as NAFTA. This “trade war” is more commonly known as competition, something Mr. Trump praises in everything from education, health care, to wages. Before becoming the economic crusader of the jobless middle-class, Trump clearly stated the benefits of such competition himself, declaring its winner consumers who enjoy "more choice and more quality at lower cost,” in 2000.
Furthermore, Trump, proudly anti-tax, blatantly misleads his supporters from the reality that tariffs are a direct tax on the goods they buy. By imposing taxes on imports, the government is effectively lowering the American standard of living by artificially raising the prices of the goods we buy.
Any goal to bring jobs to America is laudable, but the question that must follow is whether these jobs are worth more than the overall benefit of the economy at large. Unfortunately for the highly concentrated industries that have suffered losses, tariffs consistently cost more than the jobs they protect are worth. The Peterson Institution of International Economics found that NAFTA — just a slice of our country’s international trade — causes roughly 15,000 jobs a year to leave the U.S., each of which generates approximately $450,000 in gains for the American economy through lower prices and improved productivity.
The U.S. isn’t dying or facing some catastrophe of job loss, but simply transitioning to the industries in which it is more competitive. Trump’s rants lead us to believe that America has become some sort of economic dystopia fueling foreign governments and corrupt politicians, where the industries that have gone abroad are the only that matter to the American economy. This simply isn’t true.
Our nation is still the economic powerhouse of the world by a large margin. Although our relative economic position in the world has changed, that does not warrant decrying globalization as the crisis of the 21st century, nor does it call for implementing high tariffs to choke out foreign industry and exploit the prices of goods Americans enjoy. Donald Trump, as much as he likes to tout that he is not a politician, is a player of passions like any other political candidate.