According to the non-partisan economic think tank Trade Partnership, Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will kill more than a dozen jobs for every one job they create.
The cause of the wide discrepancy is the fact that the number of people who work in industries that use metal inputs far outnumber people who produce metal.
Some 400,000 jobs will be lost, with 16 losses for every job created by the tariffs, the group said today. That’s more than three times the number of job losses it expected earlier. [...]
Just over 400,000 people in the US work in metal-producing jobs, economist Jed Kolko wrote in March, but 4.6 million work in jobs that depend on metal.
Employers in industries that use metal will have to pay more for raw materials, charge more for products, and could trim or move jobs. “Steel consuming industries face annual employment declines of 97,614 in each of the first one to three years the tariffs, quotas and retaliation are in place,” the Trade Partnership says.
The Trade Partnership has also previously estimated that Trump's proposed tariffs on cars will kill 250,000 jobs in the auto industry and, in both of these cases, the numbers do not include jobs that will be lost in other industries (such as agriculture) because of foreign retaliation.
If you consider the possible consequences of Trump's trade war with China that will kick off in a few weeks, I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that Trump's global trade war will kill a million jobs when all is said and done.
Wall Street is still behaving as if everything is normal, casually shrugging off recent headlines, but that's not going to last forever.
It seems to me that pretending everything is normal could make things worse in the near future because, in Trump's mind, there have been no consequences for his policies yet. I'm afraid everyone is going to pretend that everything is normal until that's no longer possible and, at that point, it will be too late.