Lighthizer Hopeful Biden Will Maintain, Increase Section 301 Tariffs on China
Robert Lighthizer, immediate past U.S. trade representative, said that during his time in office, every decision was based on “how it brings manufacturing jobs back to the United States,” and, he said, “I think you’re hearing the same kind of language out of the Biden administration, for which I’m grateful.”
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Lighthizer praised President Joe Biden's choices for political appointees to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, during an online interview with American Compass on Jan. 26, and said “the question is whether they can sustain the onslaught of these corporate interests” who he said “are kind of a cabal” aligned with newspapers and foreign governments to argue that manufacturing in less expensive countries overseas is best for American consumers. “The China competition is still only in the early innings,” he said. “They’re going to have to be forever vigilant.” He said the new administration will have to enforce the phase one agreement with China and “keep the tariffs in place, add new tariffs where appropriate.”
Lighthizer blamed offshoring on the fact that the U.S. lowered its tariffs while developing countries didn't, and said that it was wrong to lower tariffs so much decades ago. “Where we have extremely low tariffs, so does Europe so does Japan, but the rest of the world it’s basically not true,” he said. “The way this system has grown up, it’s like permanent! There’s no way to change that. To me that’s just completely wrongheaded.”
He said there ought to be a complete reevaluation of the bound tariffs. “Tariffs are far more important to me than all this non-tariff barrier things people talk about,” he said. “The reality is we should be funding more of our government with tariffs.” He said all countries should have about a 10% to 12% tariff on most products, with a small group of particularly important products protected by higher tariffs.