Trade fight with Canada will push up prices in US, strain relations with ally

Editor:

In the early stages of dementia, people get nasty and irrational. On any given day there is a different excuse or justification.

Ronald Reagan said the United States and Canada should not have tariffs. He knew our economies are braided together as tightly as well kept pig tails on one head – the North American continent. Closer economically than any other two counties on earth.

For example, now we are going to have a 50% tariff on products like aluminum. Last year the claim was we would buy aluminum  from Bahrain instead. But, dah, we can not buy Bahrain’s aluminum this year as it has cancelled all aluminum contracts due to inability to ship through the Strait of Hormuz.

Canada will be hurt but we need many of its products simply to keep prices down. Wood, aluminum, crude oil and gas, electric and wheat to name a few.

I was just there and although they will lose a lot of jobs, grocery bills there are generally far better than ours. We will be hurt badly even before they hit back.

These folks are our good friends and insisting that we get pre-approval over their trade with other countries would indenture them to our whims. Insisting they buy our jets – which require long runways – is bad strategy when they also need more short take-off fighters which can use roads for take-off and landing in the Arctic they patrol along the northern Russian border.

There will be tariffs on products covered by our trade agreement. So we are also breaking our word. Perhaps that is one reason Canada has world-leading investment. Not here; there! That is the price for being unreliable.

And one of the saddest things is that the wealthier a family is, the less they are hurt by tariffs. They spend more of their income on investments and, unlike you and me, less on products they need to live. How the US is using tariffs is another way to shift wealth upstream.

Conrad F. Cropsey

Albion