Lively Debate

I have never understood protectionist Republicans. How can you be against taxes but for tariffs? How can you oppose government interference, but support the government deciding which jobs are more worthwhile. How can you dislike government handouts, but support corporate welfare?

Thats what protectionism is. The government deciding that some jobs are more worthwhile than others and redistributing wealth to those special interest groups at the expense of others. Worst of all, protectionism is regressive. It places proportionately more of a burden on those with lower incomes.

There are two angles to fight poverty. One is to concentrate on the income side. While nobody is overtly anti-job, I think there are ways of increasing personal income and ways of creating jobs that most Republicans would dislike such as direct subsidies and make work jobs. A minimum wage falls into the misguided, but well-meaning category. Protectionism does too.

A second angle to fight poverty is to increase buying power by decreasing prices. What does it mean to be poor if you have a place to live, enough to eat and have cable tv? Cheap prices are the free trader's welfare system.

Sugar is the poster child for free trade issues. One famous case study is the move of the lifesavers plant from Michigan to Canada. Here are some of the factors involved in the decision to move from a progressive viewpoint:

Boyd said a recent survey by his firm indicates Life Savers will pay nonunion workers in Mount Royal about $12.50 an hour--$3 less than their counterparts in Holland. With the Canadian government picking up the tab for health coverage, the savings come to about $6.5 million a year.

"Labor costs dominate the equation," Boyd said. "They account for at least 70% of all operating costs. . . . That's the real driver in the site selection process."

Workers and city officials remain convinced that the culprit is sugar. They blame the closing on a combination of federal tariffs, trade quotas and loans that benefit U.S. sugar beet and sugar cane farmers by keeping the price of domestic bulk sugar at 21 cents a pound, compared to 6 cents on the international market. That makes a big difference to Life Savers, which uses 113 tons of sugar a day. Each Life Savers candy is 95% sugar.

Last year, Brachs candy cited high domestic sugar prices in announcing that it would close its 77-year-old west Chicago plant and move 1,100 jobs overseas, one of several candy-makers to do so. Kraft isn't saying how much it will save on the crucial ingredient. State and local officials estimate it will be $6 million a year.

Sugar prices may not be the only factor in this decision, but one thing remains clear. American consumers are over paying for sugar. Since a person can only consume so much sugar in a year (the 2001 average was 64 lbs of sugar and 81 pounds of corn sweeteners), this represents a regressive redistribution of wealth. The poor consumers of the US, of which there are many, are directly subsidizing the US sugar industry, of which there are few. Do you know anyone who works in the sugar industry? Do you know anyone who does NOT consume sugar?

Another example are the steel industry protections that Bush enacted in the middle of his last term in order to score points in politically valuable Pennsylvania. The result? A huge loss of manufacturing jobs further down the value chain in states like Ohio, which became the swing state in the election. It turns out that there are far more workers in the industries that use steel than in the industry that makes it.

Here is the thing, as consumers, we are all downstream in the "value chain." Protectionism harms the economy as a whole in order to favor special interest groups with political muscle.

That doesn't sound very Republican to me.