Opinions

Trump Eyes a Japan Trade Fight


People inclined to believe that the President is crazy should pause before accepting such diagnoses from journalists without medical degrees quoting anonymous non-doctors in the federal bureaucracy. But investors hoping for a quick end to the Trump trade debates may have reason to be nervous.

Your humble correspondent appeared on the Fox News Channel this morning and gave the President due credit for the outstanding economic results of his tax and regulatory reforms. This prompted a gracious phone call from Mr. Trump in which the President sounded very stable but unfortunately also still very focused on eliminating trade deficits with America’s trading partners.

Such deficits often correlate with a thriving economy like the one we have now. We are buying stuff we need or want from other countries and if it’s more than they choose to buy from us, they use the difference to invest in America. Thank goodness that due to the policies of Mr. Trump and many of his predecessors, the world still loves to invest in the United States.

But the President sees a problem and even if he wraps up negotiations with our friends in North America and Europe, the trade uncertainty won’t necessarily end. It seems that he is still bothered by the terms of U.S. trade with Japan. Mr. Trump described his good relations with the Japanese leadership but then added: “Of course that will end as soon as I tell them how much they have to pay.”

This columnist noted that Mr. Trump’s tax and regulatory reforms have largely solved the competitiveness problem with the U.S. economy and that if he resolved the trade fights with our friends and simply focused on combatting Chinese intellectual property theft, he could rally a large global coalition to demand a solution.

Perhaps the President will be encouraged not to seek new tariffs as he continues to see how well the economy is doing without them. Today the latest National Federation of Independent Business jobs report shows a small-business sector so healthy that it’s biggest problem is finding workers to fill all of the available positions:

Small business plans to create new jobs and job openings hit a 45-year high in August… A survey high of 38 percent of owners reported job openings they could not fill in the current period… A record 25 percent of owners cited the difficulty of finding qualified workers as their Single Most Important Business Problem, up two points from last month.

This suggests that America could use more immigrants and here’s hoping that can be the subject of another phone call.

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Bottom Stories of the Day will return tomorrow.

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web.)

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Mr. Freeman is the co-author of “Borrowed Time,” now available from HarperBusiness.





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