Thursday, October 1, 2009

Obama pandering to union goons again

President Obama absolutely did the wrong thing when imposing tariffs on tires manufactured in China.  Not only do I think that he did the wrong thing, I also think he did it purely for political reasons.  These protectionist policies are actually hurting the industry as a whole rather than helping it.  The producers aren’t benefiting, because they have to make a decision to keep their manufacturing in China and pay a lot of money to import it, or to shift their production elsewhere where there is cheap labor.  The consumers sure aren’t benefiting, because they are now paying more for low-end tires.  Small businesses are also getting hurt by this trade war that Obama has started.  There is a decreasing demand for tires right now anyway, because of the state of the economy.  Many people can’t afford to go and drop close to a thousand dollars on a set of tires, so they are putting it off.  Then once the price goes up by 10-15% that drives demand down even more. This tariff obviously did not make the Chinese government very happy, which is not good, considering that they are the ones that are buying the majority of our debt.  This is big government at its best.  
The only people who could possibly stand to benefit from such a thing as the tire tariff are the Unions, who want the government to step in and protect them from any sort of foreign competition, that way they can jack up the price of their own labor.  I found the quote from Ron Kirk funny, which said “Enforcing trade laws is key to maintaining an open and free trading system.”  Wait a second.  Enforcing trade laws is the key to a free trading system?  So imposing a 35% tax on tire imports from China somehow makes the trading system more free?  And all this time, I thought that more regulation meant less freedom.  How about reducing trade laws is the key to an open and free trading system.  If you scrape away all of the BS from Ron Kirk’s statement (which would leave you with nothing), you could see that what he really meant was “Pandering to the union bosses will get Obama re-elected, therefore securing my job.”

No comments:

Post a Comment