White House Press Release - Assistant to the President Peter Navarro: "Trump Steel Tariffs Bring Hope, Prosperity Back to Granite City"

"The broader goal is a world where trade is fair, balanced and reciprocal; and American businesses and workers will win because they will finally compete on a level playing field."

Trump steel tariffs bring hope, prosperity back to Granite City

By Peter Navarro

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

July 26, 2018

Hiding in plain sight in a suburb of St. Louis is one of the great success stories of President Donald J. Trump's tough trade policies. This is the rebirth of the Granite City steelworks, idled in 2015 — along with about 2,000 steelworkers — under a drowning flood of subsidized foreign imports.

President Trump, who is visiting Granite City today, helped engineer the steelworks' rebirth with the imposition of a 25 percent tariff on foreign steel. This action, along with a companion 10 percent tariff on foreign aluminum imports, was taken in the interest of national security under the authority of Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. As President Trump correctly noted upon signing the steel tariffs on March 8, "Without steel, you don't have a country."

On the same day the steel tariff was announced, U.S. Steel's Chief Executive Officer Dave Burritt promised to immediately restart one of two blast furnaces along with its steel-making facilities at Granite City. Just last month, Burritt announced the reopening of the second blast furnace by October, promising more great jobs at great wages in a community that had been decimated by the plant's idling.

Granite City's rebirth is hardly an isolated event. The much bigger success story is that of a tariff-catalyzed renaissance in steel and aluminum production across this great land, with many of the reborn facilities in forgotten, "flyover" communities urgently in need of manufacturing jobs.

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Together, these tariff-catalyzed — and tax-cut assisted — investments will add billions of dollars in new investment, millions of metric tons of aluminum and steel production, and thousands of jobs to the national economy — while helping to build up our manufacturing base and shore up gaps in our defense industrial base. This is an economy experiencing rapid growth, historically low unemployment (particularly among blacks and Hispanics) and rising wages.

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[President Trump's] tariffs are both a reasonable and cost-effective tool to defend industries like aluminum and steel. The broader goal is a world where trade is fair, balanced and reciprocal; and American businesses and workers will win because they will finally compete on a level playing field.

Read the full op-ed here.