Tariff mistakes require solution costing $12B

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

posed to be harmed, because it was all going to be so easy. What’s the problem?

The actual problem is a political one, and that’s what the $ 12 billion is meant to address. That problem isn’t just that Trump’s trade war is going to impose pain on Americans, but that it’s going to disproportionately hurt Americans from places that voted for Trump. He may sincerely be dismayed by that fact – he has shown again and again that he considers himself the president of not all Americans but the people and places that support him – but it’s also terribly dangerous for one of his policies to so directly harm those who backed him in 2016, and who must back him again if he is to win re- election. After all, they might get the idea that Trump has not created the economic nirvana he promised, and not bother to turn out in 2020.

But perhaps I’m being too cynical. These are farmers, you might say. The salt of the Earth, the heart of the heartland, the men and women who put food on your table. Just as we absolutely must do whatever we can to save coal mining jobs, surely we can spare no expense to aid farmers?

Farmers are terrific, don’t get me wrong. But we have to acknowledge that this administration is propagating a kind of moral hierarchy of employment in which some kinds of Americans are worthy of more consideration and assistance by virtue of where they live or what they do ( or used to do) for a living than the rest of us. Think about all the effort Trump has expended promising people in coal country that he’ll restore all those mining jobs.

Yet he never went to a shuttered Sears store and made a similar promise to the people who have lost their jobs in what some people refer to as the “retail apocalypse.” As Paul Krugman noted last year: “Overall, department stores employ a third fewer people now than they did in 2001. That’s half a million traditional jobs gone – about eighteen times as many jobs as were lost in coal mining over the same period.”

There were many reasons, lots of them having to do with free markets, that those jobs were lost – in both coal and retail. In this case, though, the threat comes directly from Trump administration policies. Much as none of us wants to see any soybean farmers bankrupted, we must remember that this was completely avoidable. And that when Trump gets a dumb idea, all of us will usually end up paying.