While I cannot claim to agree with very much the President does, even I cannot ignore the actions taken by President Trump on trade.

Tariffs can be applied to a variety of goods such as food stuffs, car parts or even smartphones. The result of tariffs could mean paying more for your iPhone, your German car or your cheaply made sportswear manufactured by child laborers.  

These tariffs, designed to protect American workers from their counterparts abroad, are long overdue.

If we keep losing jobs at the rate we are going, pretty soon the only manufacturing jobs left in this country will be dedicated to making suicide nets for Chinese factories.

For years, the United States has been the victim of unfair and predatory trade practices.

Partisans on both of the aisle were quick to oppose the President’s courageous decision, but the fact remains that these tariffs are good for American workers, families and businesses.

Just recently, U.S. Steel announced it would partially restart a long dormant foundry in Granite City, Illinois providing about 500 American jobs.

These tariffs are necessary to prevent foreign countries from gaming the system; for instance, the European Union has an import tariff of 10 percent on foreign cars, while the U.S. has a 2.5 percent import tariff on imported cars.

While it is true that the U.S. has higher tariffs on products that are more important to American industry, such as tires or train cars the situation has gotten out of control with the Chinese government basically declaring large parts of their economy “off-limits” to foreign competition.

The President has taken a bold and brave step in the right direction.

Ever since the founding of our the country, the main difference between political parties was over whether America should have a freer less-restrictive trade policy as advocated by Southern farmers who rely on international markets to sell their products, or a more restrictive, protectionist idea of trade advocated by industrialized Northern states.

However, today both sides are getting creamed by the Chinese.

The Chinese have been implicated in the theft of American trade secrets, in cyber attacks on American companies and the “dumping” of large amounts of a product at once to drive down costs, benefiting countries with low or non-existent minimum wages, like China.

Even though some argue that during the Great Depression, in a moment of panic, tariff laws were hastily increased making the Great Depression even worse, the global order of trade only works if everyone agrees to play by the same rules, and so far the Chinese have not and it’s better to risk temporary discomfort to protect American workers from unfair trade practices than to lose our entire manufacturing base to people working for less than three bucks an hour.

The end result is American cities, like Detroit and Cleveland, are gutted by de-industrialization as the companies that supported them packed up and moved to China in search of cheap labor and lower environmental and safety standards.

Companies, by definition, do what is in the best interest for their profits and their shareholders.

In fact, often times it seems some politicians have dedicated themselves to ensuring that there is not a single well-paying manufacturing job in the entire country.

When politicians release ads talking about getting tough on China, they do not mean it.

They say it because it polls well in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio,

all of whom have been the victims of one of the greatest thefts in the history of the world: the theft of our entire middle class.

So, the President deserves an enormous amount of credit for doing what many a politician before him promised, then never delivered.

It is past time that someone stands up on our behalf and not China’s.

While it is true that free trade is a good thing, it does not take into account things like unfair subsidies, theft of corporate trade secrets, predatory trade practices and the devaluation of currency to make their products cheaper to import.

So, yes, it is about time that China is punished.

It is about time that the President receives credit where credit is due.