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I was a manager for a subsidiary of Reliance Steel and Aluminum out of L.A. for 27 years. If Trump wants these tariffs he just proved he knows absolutely nothing at all about the business world.
These will cost Americans more, and provide no benefits for the vast majority of people.
http://www.tiedyeguide.com/steel/AmericanSteel.htm American steel mills have faced hard times since 1998. In the wake of the Asian financial crises, rising imports have taken market share from domestic steel producers. Industry profits have declined. There has been a substantial decrease in steel industry employment and 33 businesses, including some of the largest, have been forced to file for bankruptcy protection.
The American Iron and Steel Institute and the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) have urged the President (Bushjr) and Congress to enact quotas and tariffs of 40 percent on foreign imports of steel.
the American Steel industry has been asking for tariffs for nearly 20 years.... Trump is the only one to listen
True, but they also tend to generate tariffs on U.S. produced steel on the other end, which causes the backlog of inventory on the mill floors here to increase because the lines cost millions of dollars to start once they stop. When the inventory accumulates past a certain point, the mills dump it and the service centers enjoy a short period of intense profit while still competing effectively against foreign competition. I rode that seesaw from 1987 to 2014.
There was a period when we stocked both foreign and domestic, and unless the material specified on a job was domestic, the customers would buy import because of the price difference. When the foreign ran out, we sold domestic only if our competition was also out of foreign (we had 26 direct competitors within 100 miles of us).
The article also noted that the U.S. brought a lot of problems on themselves by clinging to open hearth furnaces as long as they could, finally closing the last ones in the 90s. China, meanwhile, had gone to electric steel production as an early adopter, and with lower wages to start with and ten to fifteen per cent of the workforce required for coke furnaces, they could afford to produce it and ship it halfway around the world cheaper than we could produce it here.
Scrap was another factor. We had a huge price increase in the mid-2000s when there was a scrap shortage. All of the mills loved to buy #1 scrap from the stamping mills in Detroit, because all that had to be done to reuse it was melt it and skim it, adjust the chemistry, and it was ready to repour. ALl of a sudden #1 scrap dried up. We found out it was because foreign bidders were bidding for it at nearly twice the rate it had been going for, and the main player was Turkey. They were building up their military armament (ostensibly with the idea of invading Iraq when we pulled out), and it was cheaper for them to come here and ship the scrap back to Turkey for reprocessing than it was for them to smelt domestic iron ore.
When everything levelled off, we finally got a break when the Chinese and Russian steel started coming in substandard with huge inclusions and lamination problems. There was a building in Richmond that had to come down after six stories had been fabricated and erected because one of the support beams (Chinese) separated like the pages of a book. It took about a month, and nobody wanted foreign steel for a while. Fortunately, we had elected to keep the warehouse all domestic by that time except for oddballs like hex bar and half round that were only produced domestically once every two or three years with a huge minimum order required.
For reasons of national security, health, economy or other interests, every government controls imports American steel mills have faced hard times since 1998. In the wake of the Asian financial crises, rising imports have taken market share from domestic steel producers. Industry profits have declined. There has been a substantial decrease in steel industry employment and 33 businesses, including some of the largest, have been forced to file for bankruptcy protection.
The American Iron and Steel Institute and the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) have urged the President (Bushjr) and Congress to enact quotas and tariffs of 40 percent on foreign imports of steel.
the American Steel industry has been asking for tariffs for nearly 20 years.... Trump is the only one to listen
Great article. I'll probably have nightmares tonight after reading it and revisiting a lot of miserable days in my head. Thanks, Sport. You're a real pal.
See my post #55 for details.
Longer than 20 years, BTW. I was in my boss' office in 1987 when Bill Clinton called to talk with him about tariffs and dumping. There may be a reason they have never been applied.
Tariffs are on imports, not domestic production. Tariffs were the source of Federal revenue before Democrats passed the income tax.
You need to learn some history and study the Constitution. Inform yourself.
1.) There should be no federal revenue, as the federal government is illegitimate and has no right to exist.
2.) The income tax is illegal and is the very definition of theft and extortion.
3.) The Constitution is Statism codified on paper. Once they abandoned the Articles of Confederation the American experiment ended.
Don't you have a right to buy a crappy product though?
And as long as you have the right to make your own product from unclaimed resources then that's all you can ask for.
Did you see the clown who called me a leftist?
Today alone I have been called a right-winger, a leftist, and a Russian troll.
Statism is cancer.
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I can still have an opinion on the matter of Chinese steel though. And people's addiction to cheap sh*t.
Tariffs are not on domestic production!
