President Trump’s irrational and infantile war on America’s NAFTA geopolitical allies and trading partners is heating up. Two recent articles illustrate this slow-motion train wreck.
First is a report on how vulnerable our agricultural sector is to Mexican tariff retaliation. The report is about how frightened American farmers are these days. Besides losing sales to China — what with its recent retaliatory tariffs on our export crops (especially soybeans) — the farmers are facing a major hit from South of the Border.
An economic fool — such as Trump — notices the grossly visible part of the economic picture, but overlooks other vital parts.
Looking at the percentages of crop products shipped abroad, the article notes that Mexico buys 7.0% of our soybean products, 14.4% of our beef exports, 27.2% of our fresh fruit exports, 27.9% of our corn exports, 36.3% of our pork exports; and a whopping 45.6% of our milk powder exports. Mexico has just started its round of retaliatory tariffs, hitting US exported cheese and pork. Iowa farmers, who account for a lot of America’s pork production, are already seeing prices decline as the foreign demand falls. In Missouri, ranchers are beginning to cut back the size of these herds, in anticipation of price drops.
Last year, America exported $138 billion in agricultural products abroad, and we had a $21 billion trade surplus. All of this brings up Frédéric Bastiat’s point about the seen and the unseen. An economic fool — such as Trump — notices the grossly visible part of the economic picture, but overlooks other vital parts. He sees the number of steelworker jobs decline, so he enacts tariffs that destroy jobs in other parts of the economy, of which he is stupidly oblivious — currently, in such companies as Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Pilgrims’ Pride, Sanderson Farms, and Tyson Foods. He also doesn’t see job losses in the American manufacturing companies that use steel, such as our automakers and industrial pipe makers.
Trump is not uniquely ignorant of economics. After all, Obama waged trade wars early on (and stopped when he saw the results). Even George Bush — generally quite solid on free trade — stupidly put a tariff on steel imports. But Trump is more of a protectionist than Obama and Bush combined — by far. And as another article notes, he has a narcissistic hair-trigger temper that leads him to freely insult allies, often by means of infantile tweets.
Trump’s asinine behavior has done something Trudeau’s incompetence has hitherto failed to do: unite all the Canadian people behind the man.
The article reports that after Canada’s PM Trudeau’s comments at the end of the recent G-7 meeting that Canada would not be pushed around by the US, Trump tweeted that Trudeau is “very dishonest and weak,” and was lying. Now, let’s stipulate that Trudeau is simply a putz. But the point is, he is a putz who is the freely elected head of the government of one of our closest allies, one whose territory forms a security shield for us, is our biggest trading partner, and has fought alongside us in all our modern wars. In short, he may be a putz, but he is our putz!
Trump’s asinine behavior has done something Trudeau’s incompetence has hitherto failed to do: unite all political parties and the Canadian people behind the man. Yes, it turns out that even the legendarily polite Canadians have had just about enough of Trump’s arrogance. And they have come to despise not only Trump but also such truculent advisors as Larry Kudlow (who whined that Trudeau “stabbed us in the back”) and Peter Navarro (who said “there’s a special place in hell” for the Putz Minister).
Actually, if Navarro had any intellectual honesty — a trait he conspicuously lacks — he would have said that there is a special place in hell for the unprincipled Kudlow. Kudlow, to his credit, spent many years advocating free markets, the benefits of widespread immigration, and (especially) the need for free trade. But the chance of working with the populist potentate Trump turned him into Trump’s trick — Stormy Kudlow, so to say — and now he publicly bashes free trade and immigration. A preacher I once heard told his parish that the Devil needs no new temptations to corrupt men; money, sex, and power still work demonically well. Like the so-styled Reverend Billy Graham, who was seduced by the power of the corrupt Nixon, Kudlow the self-styled reborn Christian has fallen for the power of the corrupt Trump. The world hasn’t seen such a tragedy since Dr. Faustus.
The most recent Pew survey shows that Canadian sentiment toward the U.S. has hit a 30-year low — only around two in five Canadians still respect us. Precisely who has stabbed whom in the back, Dr. Kudlow?
