Failed Donald Trump policies - auto workers betrayed

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-gm-jobs-ohio_us_5bfc4d1be4b0eb6d931283c3
The General Motors  Layoffs Sure Look Like A Broken Trump Promise

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-27/gm-layoffs-show-even-president-trump-can-t-stop-market-forces
Trump captured the White House beause he said that he alone ould reverse America’s industrial decline. 

In fact, Donald Trump promised to bring back manufacturing and fossil-fuel jobs, (wrongly) written off as casualties of global trade and over-regulation.

Donald Trump told the Ohio people that they shouldn’t sell their houses, because their jobs were coming back.

Tommy Wolikow remembers the day he became a Donald Trump supporter.
He hadn’t previously paid attention to politics, but in July 2017 he went with his mom and aunt to a Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, where the president essentially promised to save his job.

“Let me tell you folks in Ohio and in this area, don’t sell your house,” Trump said, to applause. “We’re going to get those jobs coming back, and we’re going to fill up those factories or rip them down and build brand-new ones. It’s going to happen.”

Earlier that year Wolikow had been laid off from the General Motors plant in Lordstown, where he’d worked since 2008. He had high hopes that the plant might once again ramp up production and call him back. The president bolstered those hopes.

“I believed what he said, and at that moment it turned me into a Trump supporter,” Wolikow said. “It made me feel that he wasn’t lying and he was being honest.”

On Monday, GM announced the plant would be “unallocated.” If the Lordstown jobs are coming back, it’s not happening soon.

The company has been dialing down production at the Lordstown plant since 2017 primarily because of weak demand for the Chevrolet Cruze manufactured there. Thanks in part to low gas prices, Americans have been buying more SUVs and crossovers (like the Honda CR-V) than smaller cars like the Cruze.

“In the past four years, GM has refocused capital and resources to support the growth of its crossovers, SUVs and trucks, adding shifts and investing $6.6 billion in U.S. plants that have created or maintained 17,600 jobs,” the company said Monday. It announced that two other plants, in Detroit and Ontario, Canada, would also be shut down. Several thousand factory workers are expected to lose their jobs.

Wolikow, 36, had hoped either that consumers would change their minds about the Cruze or that GM would repurpose the plant to make the Chevy Blazer. Instead, the company said this year it would make the Blazer in Mexico.

Trump said Monday that he was unhappy about the Lordstown plant stopping production, and that GM should use the factory for another car.

“They say the Chevy Cruze is not selling well. I say, ‘Well then, get a car that is selling well and put it back in,’” Trump told reporters outside the White House. “I have no doubt that in the not-too-distant future, they’ll put something else. They better put something else in.”

Trump campaigned on a promise of protecting American manufacturing workers from cheaper foreign labor, but so far his trade agenda has not stopped companies from making moves that are unfavorable to their U.S. employees.

Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who represents the area, said Trump should keep his word about jobs coming back to the Mahoning Valley.

“So far, President Trump has been asleep at the switch and owes this community an explanation,” Ryan said in a statement. “He promised us that his massive corporate tax cut would lead to dramatic reinvestments in our communities. That clearly is not happening.”

The United Auto Workers union said it would fight GM’s decision to close the plants. UAW Vice President Terry Dittes called the decision “profoundly damaging to our American workforce.”

By the end of this summer, Wolikow’s enthusiasm for Trump had faded, so much so that he attended counter-rallies organized by Good Jobs Nation, a union-backed worker advocacy group that has been calling attention to U.S. companies’ habit of offshoring American jobs.

Wolikow said he’s got three kids, and that he and his fiancee, who works at a Cracker Barrel, are racking up credit card debt just to pay for basic living expenses. He said he’s applied for dozens of jobs with no luck, even though he’s gotten a trucking license and a diesel mechanic certification.

“It’s really hard to be a Trump supporter at a time like this,” he said.

Echo on collateral damage caused by trade wars

Opinion echo: An intellectually persuasive argument in opposition to Trump's trade wars, by George Will and published in Rapid City Journal, a South Dakota newspaper. 

If you are not collateral damage in the escalating trade wars, the bulletins from the wars' multiplying fronts are hilarious reading. 

(MaineWriter ~ Dear Mr. Will, eventually all Americans will be the collateral damage caused by Donald Trump's horrible leadership and the trade wars.)

Columnist George Will ~ People who think trade wars will somehow produce prosperity are not open to evidence based economics.  It's like saying every place is within walking distance, if people have enough time to walk there.

You are collateral damage only if you are a manufacturer, farmer or consumer, so relax and enjoy the following reports.

Whirlpool, which makes washing machines and demands for government protection, wheedled Washington into imposing tariffs on, and quotas for, imported machines. 

Unfortunately for Whirlpool, American steel and aluminum makers horned in on the protectionist fun, getting tariffs — taxes paid by Americans — imposed on imports of those materials that, The Wall Street Journal says, account for most of the weight of 200-pound washing machines. And for part of the decline in Whirlpool's share price. And for declining demand for appliances, the prices of which have risen as protectionism increases manufacturing costs and decreases competition.

Citing the threat to America's "national security" (oh paaaaeeeeze!) from American consumers (they caused 2017's imports of $192 billion worth of cars, 44 percent of all cars sold in America), the administration contemplates imposing tariffs on cars. 

USA Today estimates that the tariffs would add $4,000 to $5,000 (approximately the size of this year's tax cut on $125,000 in income) to the price of a car (average price: about $32,000). U.S. auto manufacturers oppose the tariffs, which would also cover vehicle components, $147 billion of which ($100 billion more than steel and aluminum imports combined) were imported last year for cars made in America by Americans and sold mostly to Americans.

General Motors' supply chain includes 20,000 businesses worldwide. Of the seven "most American" car models, measured by the value of domestically made components, four are Hondas, three models made in Alabama and one made in Ohio. The number of 2018 models whose parts are all American or Canadian: 0.

However, the hundreds of thousands of Americans employed by Japanese automakers have less to fear than other American autoworkers do from the American government's fears about American consumers' threat to America's security. China, retaliating against new U.S. tariffs on Chinese products, has raised to 40 percent the tariffs on imports of American-made autos. These include BMWs (87,600 of the 385,900 made in South Carolina in 2017 were exported to China) and Mercedes (The Wall Street Journal reports that two-thirds of the approximately 300,000 vehicles made in Alabama are exported worldwide). The New York Times reports that BMW has stopped exporting the X3 crossover from South Carolina to China, shifting production of it to plants in China and South Africa.

Volvo, formerly Swedish but now Chinese-owned, just opened a $1.1 billion South Carolina plant that currently employs 1,200. Volvo has planned to increase employment to 4,000, with half the workers building cars for export, especially to the world's largest auto market, China. (In 2018's second quarter, GM sold 758,000 vehicles in America, 858,344 in China.) So, under current policies, China will impose a 40 percent tax on imports made by a Chinese-owned company.

Last year, soybeans were $12.4 billion of America's $19.6 billion in agricultural exports to China, which might impose a 25 percent tariff on soybeans. The Wall Street Journal reports that University of Illinois and Ohio State University researchers estimate that over four years this "would result in an average 87 percent decline in income for a midsize Illinois grain farm."

The caroms* (MaineWriter ~ a billiard term)  of trade aggressions and retaliations call to mind an experience Gulliver had when his travels took him to the grand academy of Lagado. There he met a man who had worked "eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers." To those who say that this is as plausible as trying to produce prosperity with protectionism today's trade warriors respond: Have patience. Given sufficient time, protectionism will pay.

But as the comedian Steven Wright says, everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. Speaking of time:

In the 1830s, a Baptist preacher predicted Jesus would return to Earth sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. When the world persisted, its end was re-predicted by the preacher's followers for Oct. 22, 1844. Between March and October, the number of believers increased substantially. Despite their great disappointment on Oct. 23, many followers held to their beliefs and went on to found the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The lesson from this story, as from the protectionists' sunbeams-from-cucumbers economics, is familiar: The persuasive power of evidence is overrated.

*caroms ~ In billiards, in which the cue ball strikes each of two object balls,