Here’s a letter to The Hill.
Editor:
Mark Meadows’s stab at justifying Pres. Trump’s 50 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum reads like a term paper composed by a clever sophomore (“Trump’s 50 percent aluminum, steel tariffs will create new American manufacturing jobs,” June 23). He stuffs his text with lots of numbers, such as “seven hundred American aluminum workers lost their jobs in Washington state, 400 aluminum workers lost their jobs in Missouri and 600 aluminum workers lost their jobs in Kentucky.” But he neither provides context nor looks beyond the protected industries to the larger economy.
Meadows obviously wants readers to think that losing 1,700 aluminum-worker jobs is so momentous that greater government control of the economy is necessary. Yet when put in context, this number’s policy relevance disappears: Since December 2000 – and excluding the pandemic months – the number of Americans who were laid off or discharged from their jobs each month was, on average, 1.78 million. The U.S. economy, being large and astonishingly dynamic, features an enormous amount of routine job churn; jobs destroyed directly by trade are minuscule compared to jobs destroyed (and created) by technology, changes in consumer tastes, and other non-trade related phenomena.
As for industries other than steel and aluminum, Meadows ignores these. Yet ignoring inconvenient parts of reality doesn’t make them disappear: Fact is, for every American worker employed in steel or aluminum manufacturing, there are about 36 workers employed in manufacturing facilities for which steel or aluminum are significant inputs.* Unsurprisingly, therefore, estimates are that the steel and aluminum tariffs enacted during Trump’s first term directly destroyed about 75,000 manufacturing jobs.
But the silliness of Meadows’s brief for protectionism peaks when, after complaining that the Canadian government subsidizes that country’s aluminum production, he applauds Trump for announcing that, by now raising U.S. tariffs on imports of aluminum from Canada, the U.S. is “done subsidizing Canada.” It’s twisted logic to insist that the U.S. government, by leaving Americans free to purchase imported aluminum at prices made lower by Canadian-government subsidies, is somehow subsidizing Canada. In truth, Canada is subsidizing America: Canadians reduce their own standard of living by using their scarce resources to enable Americans to acquire aluminum at prices below the costs that Canadians incur to produce this aluminum.
Canadians, in effect, are heeding Donald Trump’s call to “put America first!” We should welcome, not refuse, our northern neighbors’ generosity.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030* Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux, The Triumph of Economic Freedom (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2025), page 105.
