The official account of the U.S. Trade Representative posted today on X:
It’s not that it’s impossible to make more clothing in America. The government could simply ban foreign-made clothing, and then it would be made in America, because people would still need clothing. The question is why it would be a good idea to do that, or to do a lesser degree of that by taxing clothing imports rather than banning them.
It would certainly make clothing more expensive. Because clothing is a basic need that everyone purchases, raising the price of it hurts poor people disproportionately.
But tariff proponents like to talk about their ascetism and sacrifice for the sake of job creation, so let’s look at that. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 90,080 American employed in apparel manufacturing in 2023. Their median hourly wage was $17.36.
The high-paying jobs in apparel manufacturing are the intangible jobs that protectionists despise. Financial managers make $78.15 per hour, software developers make $65.32 per hour, and marketing managers make $63.65 per hour.
The people who actually make the clothes are not paid highly. Sewing machine operators make $16.06 per hour. Textile and garment pressers — all 750 of them — make $15.68 per hour.
People who do jobs like these are not hoping to do them their entire lives. They are hoping to build some experience and move up so that they never have to do them again and their children will never even have to consider it. It’s completely bonkers for the government to decide that these jobs are worth imposing massive costs on others to create more of them.
The funniest part of USTR’s post, though, is that the source it cites for its chart, the American Apparel and Footwear Association (AAFA), has been vocally opposed to Trump’s tariffs.
On April 2, when Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs, the AAFA said in a statement, “To be clear, tariffs are taxes borne by the American companies that import the goods and the hardworking American families that buy those goods,” directly contradicting Trump’s belief that foreigners pay them.
“Before today’s so-called ‘Liberation Day,’ the average tariff on clothes, shoes, and accessories, necessities every American must buy, was already more than five times higher than on other U.S. imports,” the statement continued. “True liberation would have involved eliminating this high tariff burden and relieving U.S. consumers of its regressive and misogynistic effects, rather than layering on more costs that fuel inflation.”
The bit about “misogynistic effects” refers to the fact that tariffs on women’s clothing are, on average, higher than those on men’s clothing. It’s one of the “pink taxes” that actually exists.
The AAFA also issued a key vote notice to senators urging them to vote for Rand Paul and Ron Wyden’s resolution to terminate Trump’s emergency declaration undergirding his tariff actions. The measure ended up failing after the Senate deadlocked in a 49–49 vote.
AAFA president Steve Lamar explained in a December interview with Taxpayers Protection Alliance why his organization is opposed to tariffs. He said clothing is one of the most globalized industries and that before Trump’s first term, clothing was one of the most tariffed categories of imports. They’ve been fighting this fight longer than Trump has been in politics.
And yet the USTR cited AAFA data in a post supporting Trump’s trade policies. The comprehensive incoherence of the administration’s trade policy boggles the mind.