Today, President Trump hosted several members of Congress to discuss his possible plans for imposing new restrictions on steel and aluminum imports under “Section 232” of US trade law. Amidst that discussion comes this nugget, via Politico Pro[$] (emphasis mine):
The president was equally dismissive when Sen. Lamar Alexander (R‑Tenn.) brought up the negative consequences of former President George W. Bush’s decision to restrict steel imports in 2002.
“The effect was it raised the price of almost all steel in the United States,” leading to job losses in the auto-parts sector and among other manufacturers, Alexander said. “There are ten times as many people in the steel-using industry than steel-making.”
Trump shrugged off the complaint. “It didn’t work for Bush, but it worked for others,” he said. It was not clear, based on a pool report of the closed-door conversation, whether he explained that point.
I guess it was good of the President to acknowledge the widely-known costs that the Bush Administration’s 2002 steel safeguards imposed on American consumers and companies. However, the President is sorely mistaken to assume that other instances of US steel protectionism turned out much better. Indeed, as I wrote in my 2017 paper on the historical failures of American protectionism, the US steel industry has for decades gone to the government trough for new restrictions on its foreign competition, and the results these import measures are always the same: immense consumer costs and very few, if any benefits to the industry and its workers.
For example, multiple academic studies in the 1980s showed that efforts to restrict imports of various steel products annually cost American consumers between $200,000 and $2.3 million (2017 Dollars) for every US steel industry job protected:
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