Speaking at a trade event last week, former President Donald Trump bragged that he saved American jobs by threatening farm machinery manufacturer Deere & Co. with steep tariffs if it moved any production to Mexico. Trump was not telling the truth, of course; the company still plans to build a plant in Mexico. It also plans to lay off approximately 800 American workers.
While we don’t like people to lose their jobs, we have a labor shortage in the U.S., so it’s likely those manufacturing jobs he said he saved (but didn’t) can be absorbed. Mexico has a big pool of labor and a lot of immigrants coming to the U.S. to work. While we need immigrants to sustain our manufacturing and agricultural markets, helping to supply Mexico with more living-wage jobs would lead to fewer people crossing the border. That would save Trump the cost of having to round them all up. And we share a border with Mexico, so products made there don’t have to be shipped across an ocean. That keeps prices lower for American consumers. Win-win-win-win-win.
Meanwhile, while Trump is bragging about the jobs he didn’t save, if elected he supposedly plans to fire tens of thousands of American government workers who are not loyal to him. I’m guessing some people won’t see the irony, and I’m guessing he’ll brag about that, too.
Mary Alice Divine, White Bear Lake
During his recent appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump interrupted Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait during a question on tariffs. With absolute certainty that he knows better than every economist, trade official and business executive, Trump said: “It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong.” Trump seems to imagine that when a container ship from China comes into a U.S. port, a Chinese government bureaucrat walks down the gangplank and hands the port director a Chinese government check payable to the U.S. Treasury. Only in Trump world — not so much in the real world where, of course, the company importing the goods pays the tariffs. Trump’s arrogance and ignorance, and his stubborn insistence on such economic nonsense, would be pitiable if it were not so perilous.
