Biden’s tariff warfare to backfire on US consumers

Five years ago Joe Biden unseated the then American President Donald Trump and while campaigning always saw fit to lambast Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products. However after defeating Trump, Biden decided to continue with those same tariffs in place.
 
Now, fighting desperately for a second term against a come back Trump, Biden has called for even more tariffs against imported products, this time largely in the electronic and environmental sectors, to protect American companies, now lagging far behind in both production and quality. 
 
Biden’s election-year policy gambit on economic policies is based on prejudice and reveals an utter misapprehension of both economics as well as what is important to American workers and voters. The US had actively encouraged China into the global economy late in the 20th century to side-line Soviet Union, sharing technology and giving them access to American consumers because USA companies wanted access to Chinese market and labour force. 
 
American manufacturers moved to China instead of a democratic India, to produce goods more cheaply in order to increase their profits when they sold their cheap products all over the world. American companies and the government willingly sold off US jobs.
 
Now Biden is spouting bad things about China – They are “cheating” and “can’t be trusted.” It just so happens that these deceitful characterizations of the Chinese government fit longstanding xenophobic tropes about Chinese people.

 
Now American policy makers are agonizing over the fact that China, Japan and India lead the way in green energy products including making electric vehicles that experts say are far superior to those made by American companies and cheaper, being sold at half to a fifth of the cost. If Biden cared about the climate, he should welcome such innovation and help those products reach American consumers. It was the USA and UK, way back, who had spread the flow of cheap petrol products to the shores across the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

Then again, if Biden cared about the environment, he would not have increased oil drilling to historic levels in the past three years. The US has lagged far behind in electronic technology not because others have “cheated” but because US government simply does not prioritize industry in the same way.

If USA is truly anxious about their standing as a producer of electronics they could nationalize or at least heavily subsidize the appropriate industries instead of waging economic warfare on countries who do value production.

Biden’s tariffs have expanded the ones left by Trump after campaigning against them. The new tariffs don’t protect American consumers or workers. They are simply unfair and unwise favours to billion-dollar corporations and donors at people’s expense.
 
Instead of going for superior technology, giving a spur to innovation in own companies and investing more capital in research and development for electronics, Biden has just gone for increased Tariffs.
 
Simply put, these tariffs won’t “work” even on their own terms, so why is the US imposing them?
 
The reason is that people like Biden in America like to vilify Asians and China in particular. Americans are a racist, country that has long used propaganda to instil fear and loathing against Asian people and nations.

Now times of economic strife, Americans are being taught to fear Asian technology, Asian economic growth and Asian workers. Americans even blame China for Covid epidemics which they handled much better than USA and Western Europe.

China feels that Biden’s tariffs and rhetoric in support of them are racist and fit into the tired old mold that characterizes China as “cheating” and a uniquely untrustworthy entity.  Americans are already fed up with the cost of living. As it stands 9 in 10 Americans are worried about the current cost of living. Over 60 percent of Americans are concerned about the cost of necessities, and 87 percent of us are concerned about inflation and price increases in particular.

Only 38 percent of Americans rate the economy as good under Biden. Only 17 percent believe that Biden’s policies will make prices go down. Nearly 60 percent report believing that the economy is worsening because of the Biden administration’s mismanagement.

Americans don’t like the way things are going, and they blame Biden. They don’t have confidence that his policies will improve this situation, and these new tariffs are unlikely to change any of that.