Small tire don’t keep on turnin’

Irwin Stelzer comments on the punitive tariff imposed by the Obama administration on Chinese tires that we wrote about yesterday in “Friday night news dump.” Stelzer places the tariff in the larger context of the Obama administration’s abandonment of policies supporting free trade. “Some of the president’s reasons for pushing exports and tightening up on imports are purely political — he needs the trade unions and his party’s left,” Stelzer writes. “Others are more fundamental — he has to cut the U.S. trade deficit lest the value of the dollar continue its descent and add to the inflationary pressures created by his enormous deficits.” On the last point, I think Stelzer is mistaken, but his column shows that the tire tariff is a small part of a destructive pattern.