Build Back Better

 The president’s nonsensical tariff saga is unleashing economic chaos, hurting working people through canceled manufacturing projects, higher grocery prices and lost retirement savings. It is also pushing too many progressives to hop into bed with Wall Street and retreat to the old and disastrous corporate-centered way of thinking.

There is a third option: Embrace a trade policy that truly levels the playing field for workers.

Lost in the discussion of these tariffs is the reason corporations outsource jobs and the reason they lobbied so hard for “free” trade deals in the first place: They want to pay lower wages and fewer benefits to their workers and follow weaker environmental protections.

Biden, by contrast, while keeping in place some tariffs imposed by Trump, has operated from very different principles and deployed a much wider range of policies. Biden views trade policy as about more than the narrow, mercantilist measure of whether exports with any one country or another are greater than imports. He also views trade policy as part of a much larger suite of tools that governments should use to structure markets so they serve a broad range of public proposes, ranging from national security needs to the rights of labor and environmental protection. It’s an all-of-government approach that combines large public investments in key infrastructure and domestic industries with checks on monopolistic concentrations of political economic power, whether by foreign or domestic corporations or authoritarian governments. 

Biden and his advisers are not just concerned with how the old “free trade” regime shifted production away from the U.S. to wherever wages and regulatory standards were lowest. They are also focused on how it concentrated production geographically in ways that left supply chains vulnerable to shocks from pandemics, climate change, and armed conflict as well as to cornering by monopolistic corporations. And they are focused on making sure that trade policy not only serves the interests of American workers but also advances what Biden’s trade representative, Katherine Tai, provocatively calls a “postcolonial” phase, in which poorer nations share more high-value production and are not forced to earn their living through sweatshop labor. 

Taken together, these factors cause the Biden administration to conclude that we need policies that spread production to more places around the world, including but not limited to the United States. Unlike Trump, who focused on re-shoring production, Biden is more about what Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen calls “friend-shoring”—or shifting production away from excessive concentration in China and unstable, despotic countries and spreading it instead among a resilient network of allies who share our political values and market rules.