Front-and-center in this narrative is trade with China, which in 2000 was granted Permanent Normal Trade Relations status with the United States and in 2001 joined the World Trade Organization. David H. Autor, David Dorn and Gordon H. Hanson later found that, from 1999 through 2011, in locales especially exposed to Chinese imports the so-called “China Shock” destroyed up to 2.4 million jobs.
The shock is blamed for decreased marriageability among displaced workers, degraded social relationships, and more widespread feelings of loneliness. Case and Deaton suggest that exposure to imports ultimately served to “undermine social life and the structure of society, destroying the American Dream for many, and bringing on increased mortality.”
If this account is valid, the case for free trade would be severely undermined. However, there are other reasons to believe that the connection between free trade and fatalities is weak.
For starters, manufacturing jobs as a share of total nonfarm employment began falling steadily in 1954, with no acceleration in 1999. Before and after China ramped up exports to the United States, manufacturing employment as a share of total employment fell by 2 percent annually.
Further, as trade economist Robert Feenstra and his co-authors discovered, “the negative effects of import competition on U.S. employment are largely balanced out” by the “job-creating export expansion” that has taken place at home. Of the areas most affected by trade, many experienced growth in nonfarm employment above the national average. They may have experienced a decline in manufacturing jobs, but growth in other industries offset the decline.
Most tellingly, while “deaths of despair” are highly concerning and on the rise nationwide, the geographic areas that suffered the most significant increase in these tragedies are not those that have experienced the most manufacturing job losses.
And here you thought the lesson of the Smoot-Hawley tariff era was that a trade war can be destructive. Think again, folks, because President Trump’s lawyers say the courts must uphold the legality of his tariffs or there could be “a 1929-style result.”
That’s the out-of-this-world argument that Solicitor General John Sauer and Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate made this week in a letter to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The judges must give the President unilateral power to impose tariffs on any country at any time, or the end is nigh. Better buy gold and put your cash in a mattress.
Mr. Trump justified his “reciprocal” tariffs by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to declare emergencies over fentanyl and the trade deficit. A lower court blocked the tariffs in May (V.O.S. Selections v. Trump) as an illegal exercise of presidential power, and Mr. Trump is appealing.
The Federal Circuit put a stay on the lower- court ruling so it could hear the President’s appeal. Oral arguments before the full Federal Circuit late last month didn’t go well for the government, which may explain the Justice Department letter, which echoes a tirade by Mr. Trump against the judges.
“If a Radical Left Court ruled against us at this late date, in an attempt to bring down or disturb the largest amount of money, wealth creation and influence the U.S.A. has ever seen, it would be impossible to ever recover, or pay back, these massive sums of money and honor,” Mr. Trump wrote Friday on Truth Social. “It would be 1929 all over again, a GREAT DEPRESSION!”
Wow. Ending a tax increase means depression. Who knew? Mr. Trump also seems to think any judge who rules against him is a radical leftist. But the 11 judges who heard the appeal include Republican and Democratic appointees. Messrs. Sauer and Shumate parrot Mr. Trump’s doomsday prophesies in their letter.
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The letter to the Federal Circuit judges illustrates the Trump style: try to intimidate by exaggerating the impact of a decision he doesn’t like and suggest he’ll blame the judges. We trust the judges won’t fall for it. If they do rule against the President and he appeals, we hope the Supreme Court quickly takes the case.
To place huge new tariffs on imports from China, President Donald Trump claimed that those transactions are “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States.
It’s a threat that the White House now says it can put off addressing for another 90 days.
On Monday, Trump again postponed the enforcement of his threatened 30 percent tariffs on imports from China, which were set to resume on Tuesday after being previously postponed in May. In a new executive order, Trump said the United States “continues to have discussions” with China “to address the lack of trade reciprocity in our economic relationship and our resulting national and economic security concerns.”
Elsewhere in the same executive order, Trump reiterated the claim that trade with China poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” of the country.
The idea that mutually beneficial trade between people or businesses in different countries is some sort of national security threat is nonsense, of course. But, even if you accept Trump’s premise that trade with China is an urgent threat requiring extraordinary executive powers, then how can it be acceptable to wait three more months before applying the president’s chosen remedy?
Tariffs aren’t just a tax. They’re also bureaucracy. Lots of it.
G. Patrick Lynch reflects on the socialist likely-next-mayor of Metropolis.
What Trump would like is a BLS that is biased in his favor. The latest proof of that is his nominee to be the next commissioner, E. J. Antoni.
Antoni is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. He has been a relentless booster of Trump’s policies on social media. And he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics.
Whether that is due to willful misinterpretation or ignorance on Antoni’s part is open for debate. But the pattern is undeniable.
President Trump did himself no favors by firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics head because he didn’t like last month’s jobs report. He also did no favors for his nominated BLS replacement, Heritage Foundation chief economist E.J. Antoni, who will now have to overcome public skepticism to show the data can be trusted.
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Mr. Antoni’s commentary at Heritage has been highly partisan, but the BLS job demands nonpartisan professionalism. Last week he cited BLS survey data—yes, despite previously criticizing it as unreliable—to argue that Mr. Trump’s immigration policies have caused a surge of employment of native-born Americans as “artificially cheap labor is removed” from the economy.
The data he cited is questionable because it also shows that the native-born population over age 16 grew by 4.5 million since last December. That’s unlikely in half a year. It increased by about 1.5 million annually on average last decade and flatlined in 2023 and 2024. See the nearby chart. Perhaps immigrants told surveyors that they were born in the U.S. because they were afraid of being deported.
Few people trust China’s economic data because they know the government serves the interests of the ruling Communist Party. Mr. Antoni will have to take off his MAGA hat if he wants to ensure that the public and markets can trust BLS data.
