The doomsayers are wrong again. One year later, Trump’s steel tariffs are working

It’s been exactly one year since President Donald Trump enacted a 25 percent tariff on imported steel products, and the sky remains firmly fixed above our heads.

The morning after the March 23, 2018 signing, the so-called financial experts predicted the stock market would tank, sending the American economy into a recession.

“There’s near-universal consensus among both economists and business leaders that Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum are a bad idea, and that the wider trade war those tariffs could trigger would be very destructive,”wrote The New York Times.

Twelve months later, not only have those predictions failed to materialize, but the American steel industry is thriving as a direct result of those very tariffs, and the overall U.S. economy continues to soar.

U.S. steel imports dropped roughly 12 percent in 2018, as the U.S. bought less steel from other countries and produced more domestically. Overall, the market share of imported steel last year was only 23 percent, compared to 27 percent the year before.

According to the American Iron and Steel Institute, the biggest foreign suppliers in 2018 were South Korea, Japan, Germany, Turkey and Vietnam.

One name you don’t see on that list is China, which has seen its steel exports slip since Trump imposed tariffs on Chinese steel. For years, China has been notorious for dumping its steel in the U.S. market at artificially low prices, but the American tariffs have forced Chinese steel producers to compete with lower-cost producers in Asia and the Middle East instead.

John Ferriola, president of Nucor Corporation (the largest steel producer in the U.S.), credited the tariffs with giving U.S. steel producers a break from unfair foreign competition that has stunted their growth for many years.

“We have long said that given a level playing field, U.S. steel companies can compete with anyone in the world,” Ferriola told The Wall Street Journal. “The tariffs are a tool to renegotiate our trading relationships with other countries and create lasting structural changes that get every country playing by the same rules. That is how we will achieve truly free trade.”

Ferriola also recently announced that his company will be investing $3.2 billion to expand and upgrade its U.S. facilities, $1.3 billion of which will go toward constructing a new steel plate mill in the Midwest.

According to the President and CEO of the American Iron and Steel Institute, Thomas J. Gibson, the President’s targeted counter-tariffs “have enabled key planned investments in the steel industry to move forward, create jobs, and contribute to economic growth.”

In March, The New York Times begrudgingly reported that dozens of steel mills opened, restarted or benefited from new investments last year.

Jeff Ferry, an expert on steel trade, argues that the “evidence shows that the tariffs are actually working” despite the criticism of Trump’s tariffs in the liberal media, pointing out that “economic growth is up, inflation is under control, and many of the tariffed industries are enjoying strong recoveries in output, profits and employment.”

In fact, Ferry estimates that the tariffs added about $9 billion to GDP in 2018, without a noticeable increase in inflation.

In addition to the positive impact they’ve had on the national economy, the steel tariffs are also creating benefits at the local level.

Big River Steel, for instance, unveiled a $1.2 billion project to double the capacity of a facility in Arkansas last year. Steel Dynamics, the third-largest U.S. steel producer, announced in November that it will be investing up to $1.8 billion to construct a new steel mill, and No. 2 producer U.S. Steel revealed in August that it plans to spend $750 million on revitalizing one of its plants in Gary, Indiana.

U.S. Steel is also resuming construction of a new furnace in Mobile, Alabama. According to CNN, the company had halted construction in 2015 due to “unfavorable market conditions,” but restarted the project earlier this year because of the Trump administration’s trade policies.

Contrary to the hysterical doomsday predictions of the mainstream media, a full year of evidence presents the inescapable conclusion that the steel tariffs are working. President Donald Trump promised to revitalize an industry that was on the brink of extinction, and he’s kept that promise.

One year on since the enactment of steel tariffs, the predictions of doom for our economy under the leadership of Trump have been utterly disproved once again.

This story was originally published March 23, 2019 at 8:32 PM.