When White House economic adviser Gary Cohn showed up in the Oval Office earlier this year to give Donald Trump news of an excellent jobs report, the president’s keen grasp of economics and policy instantly came into play. “It’s all because of my tariffs,” he replied, according to Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear.” Cohn had to inform him that the tariffs were not yet in effect.
Now they are, and the news is not so sunny. The Federal Reserve reported Wednesday that already, “Tariffs are reported to be contributing to rising input costs, mainly for manufacturers,” and worries about trade disputes have “prompted some businesses to scale back or postpone capital investment.”
Eighty percent of the world’s recreational vehicles are built in and around Elkhart County, Indiana, which voted for Trump by a 2-1 margin. When times are bad, people don’t buy RVs, because they are a luxury, not a necessity. The Great Recession walloped Elkhart, which saw its unemployment rate hit 20 percent. Nine years later, the rate is 2.3 percent. But RV sales are falling and some plants have cut production to four days a week.
View the complete September 15 article by Steve Chapman on the Creators.com website here.