The following article by Aaron Blake was posted on the Washington Post website April 4, 2018:
When it comes to selling your policies, it’s best to set expectations low and hope people give you credit for exceeding them. That seems to be Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s role in selling President Trump’s apparent trade war with China.
But his expectation-lowering isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring.
Ross suggested Wednesday morning on CNBC that the whole thing won’t be nearly as bad as some people are saying it will be. His reasoning? Because people won’t literally be dying.
“This $50 billion that they’re talking about,” Ross said of China’s new retaliatory tariffs against the United States, “amounts to about three-tenths of a percent of our GDP. So it’s hardly a life-threatening activity.”
He added: “The amounts relative to our economy are trivial; they’re not going to blow anything up.”
And: “This is not World War III.”
And: “That doesn’t mean that this is going to be Armageddon.”
This, it bears noting, is quite different from how Republicans have countered Democrats’ arguments about Trump’s policies. They have (perhaps rightly) eviscerated House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for calling the GOP tax cuts “crumbs.” Just because the tax cuts for low-income and middle-class individuals weren’t massive by San Francisco standards, they argued, didn’t mean they weren’t significant to real people.
Ross’s argument, by contrast, is that China’s retaliatory tariffs are essentially “crumbs” and that as long as people aren’t dying in the streets, things are going to be okay. But that is a really easy bar to clear. And it doesn’t exactly speak to the productivity of Trump’s tariffs and his decision to bait China and other countries into retaliating.
It’s also probably not all that reassuring to people in the soybean, wheat and corn industries in the heartland, who had their products singled out by China. Nor is it a great argument for people seeing their 401(k)s decline in value, thanks to the overall market’s recent declines after months of steady and even historic growth.
A resounding defense of Trump’s decision would be to argue that this is ultimately a good thing, but Ross seems to be focused mostly on saying that it won’t be calamitous or lead to actual bloodshed. Ross’s argument is that regular people losing money isn’t the worst thing in the world. That may literally be true, but it’s not a great message to be forced to deliver.
Not content to stop there with the macabre metaphors, Ross added in the interview that things would eventually be worked out.
“Even shooting wars end with negotiations,” he said. “Somebody signs a treaty with someone else.”
Even not-actual-wars, it seems, are kind of like actual wars.
View the post here.