The Biden-Trump presidential election hasn’t just become a race to the bottom because voters always regarded the two candidates as the dregs. The public doesn’t want either and especially doesn’t want a 2020 reprise.
But 2024 is clearly a sprint to a low place for America, leader of the global trading system. That was made plain by President Joe Biden’s announcement that he intends to slap 25%-100% tariffs on Chinese imports from electric vehicles to medical syringes and needles.
Former President Donald Trump responded like a gambler going double or quits, saying, “I will put a 200% tax on every car that comes from those [Chinese] plants.” Biden will presumably not up the ante, so where does that leave him?
Not in a good place. I’ve noted that he can’t out-tariff Trump. If voters want a trade warrior, they’ll prefer the real thing over Biden, who previously promised to undo Trump’s tariffs but kept them and now boasts he is better at them than their originator.
China is a hostile trade cheat and should be confronted, but Biden goes about it in a muddled, cackhanded way, which is his usual modus operandi. He announces big increases in the price of Chinese imports only a week after delaying a tax squeeze on Chinese components. He mandates electric cars that cost $100,000 more each to build than people are prepared to pay for them, then subsidizes them and also raises their costs.
It looks like what it is — a president who doesn’t know what he is doing. Biden’s climate agenda, which is what the EVs are for, can do nothing to affect climate, but it does push production and jobs overseas.
No bad policy is an island, entire of itself. Each leads to other policies, usually more bad ones. The knee bone is connected to the thigh bone, and the thigh bone is connected to the hip bone. So, like its author, Biden’s policy agenda stumbles along with a tottery gait inspiring no confidence that it can reach its desired destination.
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Tariffs, like other policies such as student loan “forgiveness,” are intended to give the impression that Biden is on the side of the little guy. After signing his tariff order in the Rose Garden, the president handed the pens he used to a carefully arranged, racially mixed group of union workers who’d been invited to witness the event. On Biden’s face in one photo is the smug look of a fellow who thinks himself a wit. He has obviously made a quip with which he is well pleased, and he is getting the chuckles he wants in response.
But it is all a fraud. Tariffs are bonbons for the Democrats’ Big Labor paymasters. They won’t help ordinary people but will push up prices.