By Audrey Elwood, Arts and Entertainment Section Editor
I never like to tell people I am from Seattle. This conjures up the image of a tech liberal in a polycule who whines about everything. I was told once that I should plan someone’s party because “west-coast liberals love a handout.”
I am actually not from Seattle; I am from Everett. It’s something I make a point of saying whenever I meet someone. Everett is a manufacturing city, with 31% of people employed at Boeing. These are not the West Coast yuppies you are thinking about. These are people who have to deal with the same issues as you. They experience the rise in cost of living and high taxes because Washington has some of the most regressive tax policies in the nation.
They work in the exact type of jobs Trump wants to bring back from Canada and Mexico: manufacturing. These jobs allow people to afford to live in a high cost of living area, until they don’t.
The nature of manufacturing is that it is extremely susceptible to technological innovations. It wouldn’t be an immigrant “stealing” a job, but a machine. No matter what, a robot will outperform you on the assembly line. Manufacturing is also considered to be relatively “low-skilled.” Unfortunately, people who work in manufacturing would have a harder time finding jobs after losing these types of positions.
25% tariffs will impact the 68% of imported US goods. A 25% tariff will entirely impact the price of these goods, if not close down the companies. Even the “made in America” products will become more expensive. Those US-made goods will become more expensive for Mexico and Canada we supply ⅔ of our exports to. because of retaliatory tariffs.
You can say you want American jobs back, but what happens when our neighbors are crippled by this decision? In fact, there is expected to be a loss of 248,000 jobs between Mexico and Canada. What happens then? Economic hardships will bring an increase of all the things Trump has promised to get rid of like crime and illegal immigrants.
Tariffs increase unemployment, we can look back as far as 150 years to see this. What jobs are we bringing back in the grand scheme? None — we are decreasing them.
You have been sold a lie, one that is on the basis of “more jobs”. The truth? America will lose high-paying jobs and small businesses. We are locking up our market, going against every value we have as a capitalist nation.
My hometown contains the hardest working people I have ever met in my life. Torn between manufacturing and a military base, we are as blue collar as it gets. If it weren’t for protectionism and labor unions, I would never have the opportunity I have today. My grandparents worked in a toilet paper factory for the majority of their lives to afford my family and I the luxury of a service-based job. The plant closed once they had extracted the trees in the area, leaving the area in shambles. Protectionism isn’t an inherent evil, especially when it protects the worker. We need safe labor. We need trade. We cannot exist as an isolationist state.
I have seen the damage it can do. Luckily, Everett’s Boeing is unionized, so the effects are mitigated in comparison to non-unionized workers. I have seen the property tax breaks that Boeing gets. Leaving the schools in the Boeing region the most underfunded and worst in the region, despite the area containing the biggest building in the continental United States. The wonderfully smart and talented people who are reduced to cogs on an assembly line have to work overtime after overtime to afford basic necessities. If you think that manufacturing coming to your town will be better, you are naive.
We, as Americans, need to evaluate one thing: what kind of jobs do we want? One of the main drivers of economic growth for the United States in the last century has been the move to an information economy. Instead of having to put in back-breaking labor in a factory, more and more people have developed skills. Those skills are what gives us the ability to maximize growth.
If we go back to the manufacturing ways of the past, we lose the skills that built us in opportunity cost. If there is a higher demand for manufacturing jobs, this will cause more people to go into that field naturally. More people in the manufacturing field, means fewer people in other fields. This leads to less innovation in those other fields and more unemployment, with worse paying jobs. It’s as simple as that. The worker will pay more, lose work and have fewer skills. Manufacturing jobs are essential to society, but the tariffs the Trump administration is proposing will regress our economy. Our resources, time and energy as a nation should be spent on lifting up the worker — that is our forefront goal.