Scott Paul: Toomey out of touch with steel tariff reality

Sen. Pat Toomey is placing economic philosophy above the interests of Pennsylvania’s steelmakers and workers. Toomey is a zealous disciple of free trade, even when our national security may be at stake. It’s time for the senator to change course.

There’s a very current example of why he should: The $1 billion capital investment U.S. Steel recently announced in its Mon Valley Works that will preserve jobs, build for the future and result in a far more environmentally friendly production process.

That’s good news all over Pennsylvania, period. But while the senator’s Twitter account praised the announcement, his efforts in Washington would very specifically undermine it.

Toomey is the author of legislation that would discard in short order steel tariffs the Trump administration has raised, citing national security concerns over a weakening domestic industry. But it’s the market conditions made possible by those tariffs that helped spur U.S. Steel’s investment.

It’s not just in the Mon Valley, either. In Coatesville, about 40 miles from the Liberty Bell, the workers at ArcelorMittal make armor plate that is a literal foundation of American military strength. Without its production, our nation would be dangerously dependent on imported steel for some military applications. The Coatesville mill has seen its share of tough times, but the tariff-aided market conditions have recently filled its order books and increased its worker headcount by about 10%.

Overall, Pennsylvania’s economy is still humming. The unemployment rate is a staggeringly low 3.9% and the manufacturers I hear from care far more about enlarging a skilled workforce pool than tariffs on steel imports.

Still, President Trump’s trade policies — and, specifically, his use of Section 232 national security tariffs raised on steel imports — are simply a bridge too far for a free-trader like Pat Toomey.

In recent television appearances the senator has attempted to align himself with the administration in its fight with China. But his record shows otherwise.

“If the president has a legitimate national security reason that he wants to impose tariffs, he ought to be able to convince Congress of that,” he told reporters in January. That’s a fair criticism. Trump is very talkative but not very eloquent, so allow me to make the case for the tariffs right now: Without a healthy domestic steel industry, domestic steelmakers can’t make the investments needed to reliably produce military-grade metals, or metals needed for important public infrastructure. Think of that Coatesville armor plate in the U.S. Army’s tanks, or the electric-grade steel in metropolitan power grids.

The American steel industry — for years battered by unfair trade practices, a glut of overcapacity caused by the massive state-backed industry in China, and at home in what is historically the most open steel market in the world — was decidedly unhealthy. So the administration acted by invoking the Section 232 tariffs in March 2018, and the result has been over $15 billion in announced investments and more than 9,000 new steelmaking jobs nationwide. Meanwhile, the larger economy is doing just fine, quite far from the Armageddon that the free-trade cultists promised us was on the horizon.

To Toomey, who has demonstrated remarkable flexibility on a number of other policy concerns, opposition to these tariffs is an ideological statement: Trade must be unrestrained, period.

Perhaps someone should remind Toomey that Wall Street, which staunchly opposes the tariffs alongside him, is in Manhattan and not Monessen. Pennsylvania would be well-served if its senator dropped his vainglorious anti-tariff crusade.

Scott Paul is president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (www.americanmanufacturing.org).