United States Trade Representative (USTR) Katherine Tai is defending United States tariffs on China even as globalists within President Joe Biden’s administration are lobbying for their elimination.
While Biden considers eliminating billions of dollars’ worth of United States tariffs on China, first imposed by former President Trump, Tai is defending them in court.
Katherine C. Tai during the Senate Finance committee hearings to examine her nomination to be United States Trade Representative, with the rank of Ambassador, in Washington, DC, February 25, 2021. (BILL O’LEARY/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Bloomberg reports:
The Office of the US Trade Representative continued to consider duties imposed under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which the Trump administration used to hit China starting in July 2018, to be “appropriate measures,” according to a statement filed by the agency on Monday.
[Emphasis added]The expansion of the punitive tariffs was intended to “address the defensive actions taken by China to maintain its harmful practices” that affected a broad range of American products, the USTR said in the Monday filing. [Emphasis added]
Tai’s defense of United States tariffs on China comes as Biden’s top globalists have privately lobbied for the tariffs’ elimination. Those globalists include Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
Meanwhile, the United Steelworkers (USW) has urged Biden to keep the tariffs in place.
“Too many U.S. companies have failed to take needed actions to address the threat posed by Chinese Communist Party policies. Many continue to outsource production. … [O]ur government must act in the national interest to strengthen our economy for the future,” USW leaders wrote in a letter in June.
Analysis by Breitbart News has shown that tariffs do not raise prices for Americans. The latest research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) notes that there is no connection between United States tariffs and current inflation.
“The timing of the tariffs clearly shows no correlation with inflation and eliminating tariffs could not plausibly restrain it,” EPI researchers write. “The bulk of the tariffs were in place before 2020, yet inflation only began accelerating in March 2021. Clearly, inflation was driven by many sources besides tariffs.”
In fact, a recent analysis noted that Trump’s tariffs on China have been hugely successful and helped usher in a manufacturing boom. The construction of new manufacturing plants across the United States has skyrocketed nearly 120 percent over the last year.
From 2001 to 2018, United States free trade with China eliminated 3.7 million American jobs from the economy — 2.8 million of which were lost in American manufacturing. During that same period, at least 50,000 American manufacturing plants closed down.
A closed factory is shown downtown on October 24, 2016, in East Liverpool, Ohio. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Those massive job losses have coincided with a booming U.S.-China trade deficit. In 1985, before China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United States trade deficit with China totaled $6 billion. In 2019, the United States trade deficit with China totaled more than $345 billion.
Meanwhile, a study from 2019 found that permanent U.S. tariffs of 25 percent on all Chinese imports would create more than a million American jobs in five years. American manufacturing is vital to the United States economy, as every manufacturing job supports an additional 7.4 American jobs in other industries.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.