(What’s Left of) Our Economy: New Productivity Data Further Debunk “Tariffs Hurt” Claims

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aluminum, aluminum tariffs, China, durable goods, fabricated metals products, inputs, Labor Department, labor productivity, manufacturing, metals, metals tariffs, multi-factor productivity, productivity, steel, steel tariffs, tariffs, Trade, trade law, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The Trump administration’s announcement last Friday of new tariffs on some metals-using manufactures imports was greeted with the predictable combination of chuckles and gloating from the economists, think tank hacks, and Mainstream Media journalists who keep insisting that all such trade curbs are self-destructive whenever they’re imposed.

If the critics bothered to look at the new official data on multi-factor productivity, however, they’d stop their victory laps in their tracks. For the Labor Department’s latest report on this broadest productivity measure utterly trashes their claims that the tariffs slapped on metals in early 2018 – which unofficially launched the so-called Trump trade wars – have backfired by undercutting most domestic American manufacturing.

In fairness, the Trump administration itself gave the trade and globalization cheerleaders lots of evidence for their triumphalism. Specifically, the levies were justified with statistics showing that various categories of goods made primarily of tariff-ed steel and aluminum had seen major surges of imports since the duties began. The obvious conclusion? Foreign-based producers of these products were capitalizing on their cheaper metals available to their factories to undersell their U.S.-based competition.

As a result, Mr. Trump decided to tariff some of these final products, too – to erase the advantage created for imports from less expensive steel and aluminum.

So in one sense, it’s tough to blame tariff critics for feeling vindicated about predictions that the metals levies might boost the metals-producing sectors themselves, but injure the far larger metals-using sectors. Ditto for their warnings that in an economy with so many connected industries, protection for one or a few would inevitably spur calls for such alleged favoritism by others, threatening a consequent loss of efficiency for all of manufacturing and even the entire economy.

Examine the issue in more detail, though, and you see that it’s entirely possible to arrive at radically different conclusions. For example, the new tariffs appear to be imposed on a limited set of products, and none of them (e.g., nails, tacks, wires, cables, even aluminum auto stampings) qualifies as a major industry. In other words, the chief metals-using industries, like motor vehicles and parts overall, aerospace, industrial machinery (many of which have been complaining loudly about the metals tariffs, even though their overall operational costs have been barely affected) were left out.

Finally in this vein, and as the critics imply, the new Trump tariffs also make the case for trade curbs on any final products whose significant inputs receive duties. Why indeed strap otherwise competitive domestic producers with higher prices for materials, parts, and components? This practice has been a major flaw in the U.S. trade law system, which has prioritized legal over economic and industrial considerations, since its founding. And in fact, my old organization, the U.S. Business and Industry Council, has been urging this reform since at least 2008.

Even better – to prevent cronyism from influencing such trade policy decisions, impose a uniform global tariff on all manufactures, or all non-energy goods.

But it’s just as important to point out a gaping hole in the longstanding argument that cheap imported inputs (including subsidized, and therefore artificially cheap imported inputs) are essential for the overall global competitiveness of U.S. domestic manufacturing. And the hole has been opened (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, reopened, given this previous RealityChek analysis of earlier data) by those new multi-factor productivity statistics.

They only go through 2018 (such time lags explain why multi-factor productivity trends aren’t followed as closely as labor productivity trends). But they’re the broader of the two productivity measures, as they gauge the effect of many inputs other than hours worked. And via the table below, they make clear that even the wide open access domestic manufacturers enjoyed to artificially cheap metals and other imported inputs have played absolutely no evident role in improving industry’s health. In fact, there’s reason to conclude that the more access domestic industry had to such materials, parts, and components, the less productive it became.

                                                               Total mfg   Durable goods   fabr metals

1990s expansion (91-2000):                   +23.40%       +38.76%         +4.79%

bubble decade expansion (02-07):          +11.74%      +16.61%          +7.62%

current expansion (10-present):                -4.84%         -0.84%           -4.51%

pre-China WTO (87-2001):                   +22.18%      +37.72%           -3.32%

post-China WTO (02-present):               +6.72%      +17.17%           -2.05%

As usual, the time periods chosen to illustrate these trends consist (with one exception) of recent economic expansions (because they enable the best apples-to-apples comparisons to be made). And the 1990s expansion is the first one examined because the relevant Labor Department data only go back to 1987. The products chosen consist of all manufactured goods, durable goods industries (the super-category containing most of the big metals users), and fabricated metals products (the most metals-intensive sectors of all).

The table demonstrates that multi-factor productivity growth across-the-board has weakened dramatically from the 1990s expansion through the current – ongoing – expansion. The slowdown between the 1990s expansion and the previous decade’s expansion was moderate (and multi-factor productivity actually grew faster during the second in fabricated metals, though in absolute terms its improvement lagged badly). But during the current recovery, multi-factor productivity growth has been replaced in all three instances by multi-factor productivity decline. And crucially, during none of this time did any of these manufacturing categories face any shortage of imported inputs of any kind – subsidized or not.

Indeed, one event in 2001 greatly increased the supply of subsidized inputs – China’s admission into the World Trade Organization (WTO). For once China joined, the difficulty of using U.S. trade law to keep these Chinese products out of the U.S. economy became much greater.

Yet at the same time, as shown below, productivity growth was considerably weaker after China’s WTO entry than before in manufacturing overall, and in durable goods. And although its performance actually improved in fabricated metals, that industry’s performance was much worse in absolute terms.

Nor does the inclusion of the 2007-2009 Great Recession in the post-2002 China-related data (which violates the “apples-to-apples rule”) seem to have been a game changer – because the worst performances of all in each case, and by a mile, have been registered during the current expansion. Moreover, since the data stop in 2018, those current expansion results are dominated by the period preceding both the Trump metals tariffs and the Trump China tariffs (most of which target industrial inputs, as opposed to final products).

It’s entirely possible that, for various reasons, the multi-factor productivity statistics would have been even worse if not for the widespread availability of cheap imports. Or maybe multi-factor productivity isn’t much of a measure of manufacturing’s health? Both alternative explanations, however, seem pretty far-fetched (especially given the pre- and post-China WTO results).

Much likelier – as I argued in that post linked above – the availability of cheap inputs has helped retard productivity growth by enabling businesses to achieve cost-savings without investing in research and development into new products and especially processes, and without buying more efficient equipment (including software).

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Trump Tariffs Will Devastate American Businesses? Seriously?

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China, Heritage Foundation, inputs, Investors Business Daily, manufacturing, Obama, productivity, profits, regulations, regulatory reform, tariffs, Tax Cuts and Job Act, Tax Foundation, taxes, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Since the Trump administration’s actual and potential tariffs became an issue,  opponents (including many American businesses) have complained loudly that these moves would ruin their global competitiveness by raising input costs. And in a supposedly devastating irony, they insist that these higher prices would offset much of the impact of the new tax cuts championed by the President.

If only looking broadly at recent changes in business costs justified such concerns. Or even came close. In fact, the big picture shows that domestic U.S. businesses – including steel users and companies that rely on parts and components from China in particular – have received benefits that will dwarf the costs created by tariffs. These higher costs, moreover, should be all the more acceptable given that a tariff-centered approach is the only response to longstanding predatory foreign economic practices like government-subsidized overcapacity and officially enabled intellectual property theft – whose gravity is now (finally) widely recognized – that hasn’t already failed.

To take one typical example, the Tax Foundation, a think tank that’s called the new Tax Cuts and Jobs Act “once-in-a-generation pro-growth tax reform,” thinks the following finding decimates the case against the proposed U.S. China tariffs: They’ll “offset more than a quarter of the tax cuts for 2018.” But by definition, for business, some three-quarters of the benefits of generational tax policy improvement will remain in place. (The exact share is unclear because the Tax Foundation includes consumer costs in its figure for overall tariff increase costs, but it’s no doubt roughly comparable.) In return, at least potentially, major threats to the global trading system will be eliminated or at least reduced significantly. This is an unacceptable trade-off?

And tax cuts are hardly the only major helping hand business has received from the Trump administration. According to one major supporter, the editorial page staff of Investor’s Business Daily (IBD), the regulatory cuts and changes accomplished so far by the President amount to a “Yuuuge” promise kept. Citing a (sympatico) Heritage Foundation study, the publication specified that the net gains for business far exceeded the alleged dollar amount of relief anticipated from the first phase of the new regulatory reform program – $645 million.

For the Trump accession to the White House meant that American companies would no longer be contending with an Obama administration that imposed $120 billion in regulatory costs on the nation’s economy each year, and wouldn’t need to worry about a Democratic successor presumably likely to continue down this road. That’s quite a turnaround.

And the true scale of the reversal is far greater still, for according to Heritage, “the impacts [of the Obama policies] have not been fully quantified for a significant number of rules, and…many of the worst effects — the loss of freedom and opportunity — are incalculable.” In sum, according to another analyst quoted by IBD, the Trump administration’s approach is “one of the most significant developments in regulatory policy in decades.”

Finally, it’s not as if U.S.-based businesses have been hurting financially lately. Corporate profits are near all-time highs as a share of the total economy. So are manufacturers’ profits.

And revealingly, American manufacturing’s productivity growth has been lousy lately, signaling that these firms have enormous potential to absorb the higher input costs generated by tariffs by achieving greater efficiencies.

Not that there may not be numerous convincing arguments against the Trump administration’s imposed and potential tariffs. But can American business, and its enablers in the nation’s chattering classes, at least stop pretending that devastating cost hits to their operations represent one of them?