Placing tariffs on imported steel and aluminum is just as dumb as all the other Republican ideas, economic and everything else. You'd think they would stumble on a good idea once in awhile by accident, but it never happens.
The way the world grows wealthier through global trade is that poorer countries mine their natural resources like coal, iron ore, and bauxite, or purchase them from other poor countries, and use their unskilled labor to produce steel and aluminum to sell to richer countries which use their skilled labor and industrial technology to turn the aluminum and steel into value-added products like cars and appliances which they sell to their fellow countrymen and export to the citizens of poor countries which have money to buy the products made in rich countries because they have jobs mining minerals and making steel and aluminum.
So, eventually poor countries become rich and their work force becomes educated and their technology advances, and they begin to make cars and appliances, but because their younger work force will work for cheaper wages, their cars and appliances are cheaper, so the richer countries move on to making even more value-added products like airplanes, spacecraft, robots, electromagnetic trains, and products not yet invented.
This is the way global capitalism works until one of the wealthy countries screws things up the way America is doing now under the leadership of Republicans.
Instead of improving our infrastructure, supporting research that will create technological advances, and investing in workforce training and education, Republicans are siphoning off trillions of national income to make the wealthy wealthier. And to further exacerbate the damage, they have decided to support, by placing tariffs on imports, dangerous, polluting, low- tech, low-wage jobs in mineral extraction and aluminum and steel making - jobs that the American economy moved on from decades ago.
It makes no sense until you look at it through the lens of Republican economic policy, which places no value on America moving forward into new realms of high tech, high-wage jobs in new, exciting, clean industries of the future. Instead, old, dirty, dangerous jobs of the past will do just fine, as long as the natural order is preserved and the rich get richer as the poor get poorer.
There are no morals more relative than conservative morals, and no hypocrisy quite like conservative hypocrisy.
