by S Karol Paul at Peter Navarro’s Taking Back Trump’s America
Joe Biden recently made a bold pronouncement in front of the United Steelworkers Union in Pennsylvania that he will explore tripling Section 232 steel tariffs on Chinese steel imports and launch an investigation into China’s exploitation of our domestic shipbuilding industry. Hey, steelworkers: do not be fooled by Joe Biden’s slick talk. Biden has done nothing but unravel President Trump’s Buy American policies his entire first term which restored our country’s steel and aluminum manufacturing base and U.S. shipbuilding industry. When President Trump is elected in November, he will take the strong, sweeping, action we all need, to crack down on countries who are stealing your jobs in real time on Joe Biden’s watch, and ensure that our ships are all American-made, as he’s done before.
Biden’s war on the steel and aluminum industries began during his time as Vice President. Steel imports as a percentage of total U.S. consumption skyrocketed from 22.7% in 2009 to 30.1% in 2016. Aluminum imports, on the other hand, rose from 41% to 53% between 2015 and 2016—one year’s time. To fix this, President Trump invoked Section 232 tariffs on foreign imports of steel and aluminum in March 2018. As a result, $15 billion in domestic investment was poured into the steel and aluminum industries, 60 new manufacturing projects or expansions were initiated, and thousands of manufacturing jobs were created. Also, foreign steel imports decreased from 30.1% in 2016 to 21.8% in 2020—even despite the Chinese Communist Party Virus—and foreign aluminum imports decreased from 59% in 2017 to 22% by the end of 2019.
As president, Joe Biden has destroyed the power and effectiveness of President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs by granting repeated exemptions to them, resulting in soaring imports. In 2021, Joe Biden suspended his steel and aluminum tariffs on the European Union, who was found to have been threatening U.S. national security with excessive imports into our market. In February 2022, he suspended steel tariffs on Japan—who has a long history of illegally dumping steel into our country and harming our workers—in exchange for a tariff-rate quota (TRQ), allowing them to sell us up to 1.25 million metric tons of steel annually free of charge. In June 2022, the United Kingdom, too, was granted a generous TRQ followed by an indefinite exemption to all steel tariffs for Ukraine, on top of the billions in foreign aid Joe has given them. As a result, U.S. imports of iron and steel surged from $19 billion in 2021 to $45 billion by the end of 2022.
Joe Biden also refuses to defend our workers against…
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