Longtime readers of this weekly effort may recall my affection for the word “woodenheadedness.” It comes from “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman’s 1984 book about “the pervasive presence… of failure, mismanagement and delusion in government.”
In Tuchman’s telling, history is filled with “the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests despite the availability of feasible alternatives.”
For example, this contrariness — or as she often refers to it, “woodenheadedness” — is seen in King George III’s picking a fight with American colonists or America’s “own persistent mistakes in Vietnam.” Both led to predictable failures by stubborn instigators who refused to relent despite clear evidence of even larger, “more spectacular” failure ahead.
“’More spectacular’ failure ahead” sure sounds like what export-dependent U.S. farmers and ranchers now face as the Trump administration continues its failing, completely incomprehensible tariff policy that not even its ardent MAGA supporters can explain.
And yet, no hard fact deters the president’s insistence that his ever-changing, “beautiful” tariff program will work sooner or later. For example, one goal of the indecipherable tariffs on China, says the White House, is to bring back to America high-paying, high-tech jobs “like iPhone assembly.”
By any U.S. standard, however, there are no “high paying, high-tech” jobs in China. According to one business news service, the “average monthly salary for an iPhone assembler in China is around $500 to $1,000 depending on overtime and location.” Another reports that “workers at Foxconn, another major Apple supplier, may earn 19 to 20 yuan (US$2.76 to $2.90) per hour.”
Those two, irrefutable facts lead to two obvious realities. First, no American will leave their current job for the chance to earn 1970s wages assembling high-tech anything in the U.S. now or in the foreseeable future.
Second, Apple and its high-tech competitors will find ways around tariff-impacted Chinese manufacturing costs that avoid any eight-to 10-fold increase in labor costs. The most obvious strategy is —surprise, surprise — lobby the White House for an exemption from the business-strangling, economy-cracking tariffs.
If the goal, as has been explained repeatedly by the woodenheaded White House, is to raise U.S. wages and government income while punishing China, the Trump administration punted away that opportunity on one of the first days of its administration — its first administration, Jan. 23, 2017.
On that day, the new administration noisily announced the U.S. would leave the almost-completed Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation free trade organization then almost built to bring together 40% of the global economy that rimmed the Pacific Ocean.
Just as important as who was in the TPP group — Australia, Japan, Mexico, Canada, the U.S. and others — was who wasn’t in the group, China. In fact, the TPP’s exclusion of China was a founding principle of the organization. It was to be a powerful and decisive tool to swiftly discipline and counter the rising global power if it stepped out of line.
The Trump Administration’s withdrawal, however, had the opposite effect: it weakened any market clout TPP members might build over China, diluted most of the stiff trading rules sought by the U.S. and, in the end, left the door open to China’s entrance into the very group conceived to keep it out.
Worse, the U.S. walked away from the very successes the current Trump administration claims it will get — it won’t — through its uncooked, unseasoned tariff hash.
According to the International Trade Commission, leaving the TPP cost the U.S. an anticipated $42.7 billion increase in GDP through 2032 and $131 billion of “gains to U.S. real incomes… through 2030.”
Now, eight woodenheaded years later, here we go again.
