US Trade Representative Reveals Why Biden Kept Trump's Tariffs on China

The top U.S. trade official said President Joe Biden continued his predecessor's tariffs on Chinese goods in the service of creating American jobs.

The tariffs are a tool in a diverse economic toolkit that is being used to shore up the middle class, Trade Representative Katherine Tai said Monday during a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in Washington, D.C.

Former president and current Republican front-runner Donald Trump said recently he'd consider slapping tariffs in excess of 60 percent on Chinese products if elected for a second term.

A recent study co-authored by the non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research said the trade war launched by the Trump administration has had no effect on "newly protected sectors" of the American job market. But it has negatively affected employment, especially in the agriculture industry, the authors said.

Asked about the politicization of the issue, as well as some researchers' claim the tariff regime had a net negative effect on U.S. jobs, Tai said detractors were missing the big picture.

"In many ways, it's a red herring," she said. "What is really important to appreciate about tariffs is that they're a tool. They're a tool that can be used in constructive ways. They're a tool, at least for us in trade remedies....They are a playing-field-leveling tool. They are a tool for remedying unfair trade."

She stressed that the government's economic policy goes beyond this tool and that the Biden administration is focused on revitalizing the middle class and "ensuring that there is more opportunity in our economy, that we can address the increasing sense of economic insecurity that Americans—especially younger Americans—have been feeling over the past 10, 20 years."

Newsweek has reached out to the Office of the United States Trade Representative with a written request for comment.

Other tools in the mix are investments, such as in science, the semiconductor industry, as well as in green technology as targeted by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, she said.

Tai invited the audience to "look at all of these working in concert and how they have made changes to the US economy," saying she estimates Biden has created nearly 1 million jobs in the manufacturing sector alone.

"You have to be looking at all of these policy vectors as combined. But picking and choosing them, I think, really does trade policy as part of the economic policy family a significant injustice."

The trade war between the world's two largest economies kicked off in 2018 with an initial salvo of trade barriers to coerce China into ending what Trump called "unfair trade deals" and what the U.S. and a number of other allies said amounted to intellectual property theft.