The bite that hits

I sent a text to a friend when last week’s tariffs went into effect: “As far as hammering American businesses that offshored their jobs, I’m OK with that.”

There remains something visceral in the experience of workers — like those at a San Diego defense contractor where my nephew worked — who were given a choice between dismissal or training counterparts who were taking their jobs to Mexico.

As I was working on this piece, the phone on my desk rang and the display said it was Judy Chu, our U.S. representative. So I picked up and heard a message saying a town hall meeting was about to start. All I needed to do was stay on the line.

The instruction said to press *3 if I wanted to ask a question. I needed material so I pressed to ask what Chu thought of U.S. jobs going to Mexico. But lots of people were ahead of me and someone else asked a more friendly version of the tariff question.

“It will immediately raise the price of steel, groceries, car parts, construction materials,” Chu answered.

She argued that tariffs would lead to reciprocal tariffs and affect jobs in the U.S. — “major job losses for manufacturers and farmers.”

But the union folks who went to Trump probably weren’t buying it, and I wasn’t sure I was either.

The pain endured by working people in the export of their jobs has been going on since 1993, when Clinton pushed NAFTA through Congress with Republicans providing the majority of the votes in favor.

Those jobs have been replaced by work chauffeuring people or their meals around town, and other service jobs, with much lower pay.

Under the threat of tariffs, companies have been making plans to open factories back in the U.S. for the manufacture of cars and computer chips.

That should in turn generate high-paid jobs and, given that we are already at near full employment, push up the overall rate of pay.

So Chu and her fellow Democrats are stuck on this one. Because they may well be right that the economic effect of tariffs is mostly negative, slowing down the economy and driving prices higher.

But the Republicans have the argument that appeals to the anger that has built up over time as manufacturing jobs were lost and unions were ground down into nothing. The Democrats sound like Wall Street economists who still don’t get it.

When I listened to political pitches as a reporter, I always waited for the bite that hits.

In the town hall, Chu started by talking about prices going up. But it got no traction and no questions in the hour or so that I listened. It didn’t hit.

One constituent asked about Social Security, another about the nation’s parks and public lands. Immigration came up and so did the cost of public education.

The discussion was interrupted by a spot survey on what Chu described as the “reverse Robin Hood budget” that would cut social benefits while giving tax breaks to wealthy Americans. You pressed different phone buttons to signal whether you were for, against or needed more information.

Later in the discussion the results were announced, and to my surprise, even with the loaded premise, only 66% of the town hall audience was opposed. The remaining third either supported the Republican budget bill or needed more info.

Even so that was the only sound bite that I thought worked — cuts are being made to medical care and food programs in order to give more money in tax breaks to the most wealthy. As Bernie Sanders put it, riffing on Lincoln, “a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires.”

Now the issue of protecting the environment, which resonates so powerfully with me, apparently has little bite. It was nowhere to be heard during the town hall.

Nevertheless I was glad I picked up the phone just at the end of the work day to hear some of the voices of the people.

It was a demonstration of the most powerful antidote to the poison of these times. As put by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who made a brief appearance, “The enemy of democracy is apathy.”