AAM’s president explains why in a new op-ed.
AAM President Scott Paul has an opinion piece in Friday's edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review criticizing Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey (R) for his action to weaken trade enforcement tools.
Despite the fact that many of his constituents have benefited from recent trade action — which also has led to major investments in the Keystone State — Toomey continues to work to actively undermine these vital mechanisms. As Scott Paul writes:
The American steel industry — for years battered by unfair trade practices, a glut of overcapacity caused by the massive state-backed industry in China, and at home in what is historically the most open steel market in the world — was decidedly unhealthy. So the administration acted by invoking the Section 232 tariffs in March 2018, and the result has been over $15 billion in announced investments and more than 9,000 new steelmaking jobs nationwide. Meanwhile, the larger economy is doing just fine, quite far from the Armageddon that the free-trade cultists promised us was on the horizon.
To Toomey, who has demonstrated remarkable flexibility on a number of other policy concerns, opposition to these tariffs is an ideological statement: Trade must be unrestrained, period.
Perhaps someone should remind Toomey that Wall Street, which staunchly opposes the tariffs alongside him, is in Manhattan and not Monessen. Pennsylvania would be well-served if its senator dropped his vainglorious anti-tariff crusade.