Poll: Americans Increasingly Supportive of Tariffs to Protect U.S. Against Globalization

Americans are increasingly supportive of tariffs on cheap, imported goods from foreign countries to protect American industries and workers against wild globalization.

In a poll by Rasmussen Reports, roughly 50 percent of Americans said the federal government should “place tariffs on goods from countries that pay very low wages to their workers,” as opposed to only 26 percent of Americans who said tariffs should not be imposed on foreign countries.

About 24 percent of Americans said they were “not sure” if the government should use tariffs to protect American industries.

Additionally, a plurality of Americans, about 44 percent, said the federal government is not doing “enough” to protect U.S. manufacturers and businesses from foreign competition” from globalization which has been exacerbated by endless multinational free trade agreements supported by the Democratic and Republican party establishments.

The support for protective tariffs has increased from two years ago, in 2015, when 47 percent of Americans polled by Rasmussen Reports said the federal government should place tariffs on foreign countries dumping cheap, imported products in the U.S.

In that 2015 poll, a plurality of Americans, about 40 percent, said free trade agreements like NAFTA and KORUS “take jobs away” from Americans.

The support for tariffs is positive news for President Trump’s administration, which is combatting globalization by imposing tariffs to protect American industries. In the Trump administration’s latest “America First” trade move, the White House placed a 30 percent tariff on imported solar products.

The tariff, as Breitbart News reported, has already resulted in a Chinese solar company announcing plans to build a solar plant in the U.S. rather than overseas.

The Trump administration’s pro-American trade initiatives are a break from over two decades of globalist trade agendas of past administrations under President George W. Bush and President Obama. For years, both political establishments have joined forces to push multinational free trade deals that outsource and offshore Americans’ jobs to foreign nations.

As Breitbart News reported in 2016, South Carolina is just one example of a state that was devastated by NAFTA, with the state losing about one-third of its manufacturing jobs since 1994 when the free trade agreement was signed.

In Trump’s most significant pushback against the Democratic and Republican apparatus on free trade and global initiatives, rather than individual nation-state efforts, he ended the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement and the Paris Climate Agreement.

As Breitbart News‘ John Carney noted at the time, the Paris Climate Agreement would have further devastated middle America while shifting wealth to coastal elites:

1. Industrial Carnage. The regulations necessary to implement the Paris agreement would have cost the U.S. industrial sector 1.1 million jobs, according to a study commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. These job losses would center in cement, iron and steel, and petroleum refining. Industrial output would decline sharply.
2. Hollowing Out Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The industrial carnage would have been concentrated on four states, according to the Chamber of Commerce study. Michigan’s GDP would shrink by 0.8 percent and employment would contract by 74,000 jobs. Missouri’s GDP would shrink by 1 percent. Ohio’s GDP would contract 1.2 percent. Pennsylvania’s GDP would decline by 1.8 percent and the state would lose 140,000 jobs.
3. Smashing Small Businesses, Helping Big Business. Big businesses in America strongly backed the Paris climate deal. In fact, the backers of the climate deal reads like a “who’s who” of big American businesses: Apple, General Electric, Intel, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, General Mills, Walmart, DuPont, Unilever, and Johnson & Johnson. These business giants can more easily cope with costly regulations than their smaller competitors and many would, in fact, find business opportunities from the changes required. But smaller businesses and traditional start-ups would likely be hurt by the increased costs of compliance and rising energy costs.