Partisans in Washington don't agree on much, but they thoroughly agree on China: It's very bad, and U.S. protectionism--especially tariffs--is very good. In the White House, U.S. trade policy toward China was effectively unchanged in the transition from Trump to Biden, with the only notable shift being Biden's recent tariff increase on certain "strategic" Chinese goods. Just last month, the House of Representatives held a much-ballyhooed "China Week," in which 25 different China-related bills were passed with large, bipartisan majorities. And on the campaign trail, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris (along with Rs and Ds running alongside them) routinely mention China as either a villain or a justification for their various domestic policies. We've already detailed the tariffs' costs here at Capitolism: higher taxes and higher prices paid by U.S. businesses and consumers; fewer sales by U.S. exporters; billions in subsidies to bail out politically connected farmers; less U.S. investment due to policy uncertainty; and so on. But we've done less on whether the tariffs are actually succeeding as part of some grand strategy to cripple Beijing and reduce U.S. "dependency" on China and Chinese companies. Maybe all those costs are, like, totally worth it if they keep Chinese content away from the U.S. market and hurt the CCP as a result. And six-plus years of tariffs--five of which at the high levels they remain today--should give us a pretty good idea of whether the tariffs are working.
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