Unlike swing states, Texas will have to do more than most in trade war

“Tariffs are the greatest!” President Donald Trump tweeted on Tuesday.

Tariffs are not the greatest. They are effectively taxes on consumers, which often elicit retaliatory action from a country’s trading partners. Everyone knows that — including the president. It hasn’t prevented him from launching a trade war, of course. Trump has consistently maintained that such wars are good and easy to win. But he acknowledged, even before he launched his, that they leave some casualties. “I’m not saying there won’t be a little pain,” Trump said in April, after his initial skirmish with China.

Still, he argued, the roaring U.S. economy meant that we could afford to take the hit and that we will “have a much stronger country when we are finished.”

“We’re playing with the bank’s money,” Trump added last week, pointing to the fact that the stock market is up some 30 percent since Election Day 2016.

Still, the administration announced Tuesday that it would provide up to $12 billion in emergency aid to farmers who have been adversely affected by trade war due to retaliatory tariffs that will throttle their access to export markets.

Most of those producers live in areas that went for Trump in 2016. China’s tariffs, in particular, seem to target swing states. Republicans can’t afford to ignore that with the midterm elections less than four months away.

And the funds will be a Band-Aid, at best. There’s no guarantee that the trade war will be resolved quickly. Our trading partners may develop new partnerships in the meantime; some of them are doing that anyway.

What I find ominous, though, is that Trump’s emer-

gency aid isn’t actually a bailout. The American farmers who voted for Trump could have anticipated the risk that Trump would launch a trade war, of course. And they should have taken that risk seriously.

But farmers didn’t impose tariffs on themselves, and the emergency aid won’t change their situation; it’ll just offset the direct losses they’re expecting come harvest season.

And the Trump administration’s plan to extend emergency aid to them was several months in the making. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue began working on it because the “emergency” at hand was anticipated. It wasn’t hard to anticipate, either. In the event of a trade war, agriculture is a predictable target of retaliatory tariffs. The industry’s exports are commodities.

Nationalized agriculture

So Trump has, in a sense, effectively nationalized American agriculture. The situation farmers are facing is one that the White House created knowingly, if not deliberately, in the service of Trump’s campaign against what he calls “Fool Trade.”

That’s amusing, in a way, because Trump is a Republican and Republicans have traditionally supported free markets. In fairness, though, the federal government already subsidizes many farmers directly as a matter of course. That’s preferable to supporting them indirectly via market-distorting mechanisms like the ethanol mandate, if you ask me — and it’s something the federal government should be prepared to do in the event of emergencies, at least, because disruptions to agricultural production can leave all of us hungry.

But in this case, Trump is just using the Commodity Credit Corporation to placate soybean farmers after using them as pawns in his pursuit of a broader agenda. And what’s notable is that his reasoning on the subject could be applied to literally any industry affected by his trade war, which is ongoing. If American farmers deserve our support, so do American factory workers, presumably. And we all know Trump has vowed to be a champion for American coal miners.

So Texans should be worried about the president’s trade war if they weren’t already. Texas’ economy is still growing, as it stands. Unemployment is at 4 percent, a near-record low. And Texas farmers haven’t yet been directly targeted by retaliatory tariffs, interestingly. But the state leads the nation in exports. At some point, the trade war will hit home.

And we’ll have to be stoical when it does. I actually think one could make a case for nationalizing the agriculture industry to stabilize rural America’s economic base and guarantee food security. But Trump’s case for the emergency aid he announced Tuesday is simply that the private sector should serve his agenda — and that the federal government should intervene if it doesn’t.

A plea from Abbott

Trump has been making a similar case with regard to the energy industry, for example. In June, he ordered the Department of Energy to take action preventing coal and nuclear plants from closing, citing concerns about the grid’s reliability. And the president hasn’t yet expressed much concern over how his tariffs on steel and aluminum might affect the oil and gas industry, even though Gov. Greg Abbott sent him a letter last month raising the issue.

Concerns about the differential impact of his policies may be inherently parochial from Trump’s perspective — unless they come from a swing state. He says his goal is to make America great again. He’s stipulated that we’ll be a stronger country as a result of his trade war. It stands to reason we should all do our part, but in the event of a trade war, Texas will have to do more than most.