Former President Donald Trump’s billions of dollars worth of tariffs on China-made products have successfully helped spur a manufacturing boom across the United States, business executives and their recent investments reveal.
While President Joe Biden considers cutting U.S. tariffs on China — first imposed by Trump — new data and reports from manufacturing executives published in Bloomberg show the tariffs have helped bring a resurgence of manufacturing back to American communities, as they were intended to do.
Bloomberg reports:
For some companies, the first nudge they got to revamp their supply-chain lines came two years before Covid, when then-President Donald Trump began slapping tariffs on Chinese products again and again. [Emphasis added]
Generac Holdings, a maker of power generators, started mapping out plans to shift some production from China, and when the pandemic hit, those plans got supercharged. The company now gets more of its parts from suppliers in the US and Mexico, produces more generators near its headquarters outside Milwaukee and runs a brand new plant in a small town just north of Augusta, Georgia. [Emphasis added]
The construction of new manufacturing plants across the U.S. has skyrocketed nearly 120 percent over the last year. The projects include new chip plants in Phoenix, Arizona, along with aluminum and steel plants going up in Alabama, Arkansas, and Kentucky.
Likewise, near Buffalo, New York, an air compressor plant has ramped up massively thanks to the need for semiconductors and steel.
One executive told Bloomberg that gripes about expenses related to reshoring to the U.S. are exaggerated. The executive said reshoring to the U.S. has proven immensely useful when supply chains are backed up and shipping costs have soared.
Chart via Bloomberg
Chart via Bloomberg
A recent UBS survey, Bloomberg notes, showed that more than 90 percent of executives surveyed said they were planning or had plans to move their manufacturing out of China. Roughly 8-in-10 of those executives said they were considering reshoring the manufacturing to the U.S.
While Biden has considered cutting U.S. tariffs on China, Trump has called such a potential move a “terrible mistake” that would reward the communist country and the multinational corporations that continue to do business there.
“These tariffs have brought many billions of dollars to our country, and made affected businesses, such as steel, viable again in the United States … taking these tariffs off would be a clear signal that the United States is weak, ineffective, and doing business as usual,” Trump said in a statement.
The United Steelworkers (USW) union agrees with Trump and has urged Biden not to cut any U.S. tariffs on China.
“Too many U.S. companies have failed to take needed actions to address the threat posed by Chinese Communist Party policies. Many continue to outsource production … our government must act in the national interest to strengthen our economy for the future,” USW executives wrote in a letter to Biden.
Analysis by Breitbart News has shown that tariffs do not raise prices on Americans. The latest research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) notes that there is no connection between U.S. tariffs and current inflation.
From 2001 to 2018, U.S. free trade with China eliminated 3.7 million American jobs from the economy — 2.8 million of which were lost in American manufacturing. During that same period, at least 50,000 American manufacturing plants closed down.
Those massive job losses have coincided with a booming U.S.-China trade deficit. In 1985, before China entered the WTO, the U.S. trade deficit with China totaled $6 billion. In 2019, the U.S. trade deficit with China totaled more than $345 billion.
Meanwhile, a study from 2019 found that permanent U.S. tariffs of 25 percent on all Chinese imports would create more than a million American jobs in five years. American manufacturing is vital to the U.S. economy, as every manufacturing job supports an additional 7.4 American jobs in other industries.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.