We are beset on all sides. From across oceans — on the east and the west — a deadly virus has invaded our country and brought our society to a halt. From the south, waves of undocumented migrants and refugees have, in recent years, overwhelmed our border.
And now from the north comes the invasion of ingots.
You may not be fully aware of the ingot invasion, but it’s a serious matter. It’s a national security threat, in fact — or so President Trump has declared.
If you’re not familiar with ingots, they are not a tribe of Canada’s First Nations. They are inert blocks of metal. In this case, they are lumps of aluminum, often about the size of a candy bar.
“To be a strong nation,” Trump said in his speech, dubbing Canadian ingots a threat to U.S. national security, “America must be a manufacturing nation and not be led by a bunch of fools. That means protecting our national industrial base.”
The president was speaking at a factory in Clyde, Ohio. If you own a Whirlpool, Maytag, or Amana washing machine, it was probably built in Clyde. “Every day, 20,000 gleaming new machines come rolling off that beautiful assembly line,” Trump said. “Every single one is proudly inscribed with that glorious phrase, ‘Made in the U.S.A.’”
The Clyde workers make the washing machines in Clyde. But they don’t make ingots there. In fact, the factory consumes ingots, and so Clyde welcomed the ingot invasion.
Manufacturers, you see, buy ingots, melt them down, and form them into things more useful than ingots — such as the can for a Coors Light, the body of a Ford F-150, or the drive block of a Whirlpool washing machine.
Thus, Trump’s Clyde speech, with its fine praise of American manufacturing, undermined the case that we should fear the foreign ingots, even when they are crossing our northern border in large numbers thanks to the pandemic.
North American aluminum producers in January and February — like most of us — did not anticipate the effects of the coronavirus. By late March, as factories across North America closed or slowed down and consumer demand dropped, producers were sitting on mountains of ingots that had nowhere to go.
This was bad news for the ingot-makers, but good news for the ingot users. The ample supply of and lower demand for aluminum meant lower ingot prices for manufacturers.
Normally, a supplier experiencing high inventories and thus lower prices doesn’t amount to a national security emergency. But because so many of the ingots being melted into useful American machine parts this spring and summer were Canadian in pedigree, Trump felt he had to step in.
Trump invoked the law that allows him to increase taxes without Congressional approval and imposed a 10% tariff on “imports of non-alloyed unwrought aluminum articles from Canada” — that is, Canadian aluminum ingots.
“Earlier today, I signed a proclamation that defends American industry by reimposing aluminum tariffs on Canada,” Trump said in Clyde.
But a vast majority of aluminum-related jobs in America involve using aluminum, rather than producing it. So Trump is taxing a very large portion of American industry in order to protect a very small portion of it.
We agree with Trump that American manufacturing is important to American security and to Midwestern communities. And that’s precisely why we do not support Trump’s actions here.
The ingots, like the Canadians, are our friends. Plentiful ingots mean more washing machines made in the U.S.A.
We’ve got plenty of enemies to worry about. Let the ingots in.
