Biden keeps Trump tariffs, invokes climate – Daily Breeze

Trump-era protectionism is here to stay under President Biden.

Over the weekend, the Biden administration announced a partial rollback of Trump-era tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from the European Union.

The tariffs of 25% on imported steel and 10% on imported aluminum were imposed by President Trump in 2018 on what  were officially national security grounds under Section 232 Trade Expansion Act of 1962.

President Biden could simply repeal the tariffs, which he should do. But rather than do that, Biden  has opted for a more convoluted approach, imposing a tariff-rate quota, which allows for imports to resume up to a point before tariffs are applied.

Under the new system, 3.3 million metric tons of steel could be imported into the United States tariff-free from the European Union, with imports above that level hit with the 25% tariff. For context, the U.S. imported 4.8 million metric tons of steel from the E.U. in 2018.

“Metal unions in the United States praised the deal, which they said would limit European exports to historically low levels,” reported The New York Times.

While the Biden administration couched the deal in glowing terms, saying it “delivers a major win in the fight to address the climate crisis while protecting our workers and industry,” the reality is the tariffs are not only fundamentally unjustified but ultimately harmful to Americans and American workers.

First, at no point has anyone actually believed that allowing American companies to import steel and aluminum from the European Union poses a national security threat requiring tariffs to protect the country, which is the legal basis for the tariffs in the first place.

Indeed, President Trump, who declared himself “Tariff Man,” consistently couched his public messaging about tariffs not in national security terms but in economic terms, believing that American steel and aluminum producers, and by extension the American economy, would be better off with a greater reliance on domestic sources.

In reality, Trump’s use of tariffs generally backfired.

After all, there’s always a reason why U.S. companies choose to import any number of products, including steel and aluminum. Price is a major one. By driving up the cost of steel and aluminum, that may have helped American-based steel and aluminum producers, but it ended up hurting the far more-numerous companies that use steel and aluminum.

In 2019, the Federal Reserve released a study finding that while the tariffs helped some industries in the U.S., the benefits were offset by reductions in manufacturing employment and higher prices. The Tax Foundation has likewise estimated that tariffs imposed by the U.S. will, in the long-run, reduce GDP by 0.23% and come at the cost of over 176,000 full-time jobs.

The tariffs, then, serve neither a coherent national security purpose nor even provide a net economic benefit (which isn’t a legitimate basis for the tariffs under Section 232).

All Biden has done…