The 'China Shock' Offers a Lesson. It Isn't the One Trump Has Learned.

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/11/business/economy/tariffs-trump-china-shock.html

https://archive.ph/pe3OR

The ‘China Shock’ Offers a Lesson. It Isn’t the One Trump Has Learned.
Economists say the U.S. manufacturing decline in recent decades was not mainly about free trade, but about the pace of change without time to adjust.
By Ben Casselman
April 11, 2025 Updated 6:18 a.m. ET

When Congress voted to normalize trade relations with China at the beginning of this century, U.S. manufacturers braced for a stream of cheap goods to begin flowing into U.S. ports.

Instead, they got a flood. Imports from China nearly tripled from 1999 to 2005, and American factories, with their higher wages and stricter safety standards, couldn’t compete. The “China shock,” as it has come to be known, wiped out millions of jobs in the years that followed, leaving lasting scars on communities from Michigan to Mississippi.

To President Trump and his supporters, those job losses are an object lesson in the damage caused by decades of U.S. trade policy — damage he promises that his tariffs will now help to reverse. On Wednesday, he further raised duties on imports from China, well beyond 100 percent, even as he suspended steep tariffs he had imposed on other trading partners.

Few economists endorse the idea that the United States should try to bring back manufacturing jobs en masse. Even fewer believe that tariffs would be an effective tool for doing so.

But economists who have studied the issue also argue that Mr. Trump misunderstands the nature of the China shock. The real lesson of the episode wasn’t about trade at all, they say — it was about the toll that rapid economic changes can take on workers and communities — and by failing to understand that, Mr. Trump risks repeating the mistakes he claims he has vowed to correct.

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The moron doesn't care about jobs or economics. He wants to use tariffs to replace the income tax

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. tRump's reaction to the impending future is "Back to the Fifties!" (including suppressing women, blacks & browns). nt