Green innovation is declining---Biden’s tariffs hinder cooperation and competition with China.

Five years ago Joe Biden was running to unseat then American President Donald Trump and saw fit to justly lambast Trump's tariffs on Chinese products. After beating Trump, Biden decided to keep those same tariffs in place.

Now, running for a second term, Biden has called for even more tariffs against Chinese products, this time largely in the electronic and environmental sectors, to protect Western companies, now lagging far behind in both production and quality. 

Biden's election-year policy gambit is derivative of Trump's cynical politics based on prejudice and reveals an utter misapprehension of both economics as well as what is important to American workers and voters. The US eagerly welcomed China into the global economy late in the 20th century, sharing our technology and giving them access to our consumers because our companies wanted access to their market and labor force. 

We let American manufacturers move to China to produce goods more cheaply in order to increase their profits when they sold their products back to our population, now stripped of jobs. China never "stole" our jobs - American companies and the government willingly sold off US jobs.

Still, Biden is spouting the same old lies about China - They are "cheating" and "can't be trusted." It just so happens that these deceitful characterizations of the Chinese government fit longstanding xenophobic tropes about Asian people spread by American politicians for centuries. 

Now we're agonizing over the fact that China leads the way in green energy products including making electric vehicles that experts say are far superior to those made by American companies and cheaper, being sold at half to a fifth of the cost. If Biden cared about the climate, he might welcome such innovation and help those products reach American consumers the way he and other US politicians eased the flow of cheap petrol products to our shores across the Pacific.

Then again, if Biden cared about the environment, he would not have increased oil drilling to historic levels in the past three years. The US has lagged far behind China in electronic technology not because the People's Republic "cheated" but because our government simply does not prioritize industry in the same way. If we are truly anxious about our standing as a producer of electronics we could nationalize or at least heavily subsidize the appropriate industries instead of waging economic warfare on countries like China who do value production.

Biden's tariffs don't just expand on the Trump ones he left in place after campaigning against them, they are in direct contradiction to a new tax credit he's offering American consumers who purchase electric vehicles. Beyond being another example of his assault on the environment, Biden's tariffs are simply denying Americans superior products at a lower cost.

The tariffs don't protect American consumers or workers. They are simply unfair and unwise favors to billion-dollar corporations and donors at our expense.

We shouldn't care where superior technology comes from. Still, even within the framework of national chauvinism there's little reason to believe that making it harder for American consumers to buy superior Chinese products will spur innovation in our own companies. These tariffs remove the vaunted competition that capitalists claim is instrumental to innovation and they do not invest more capital in research and development for electronics. 

Simply put, these tariffs won't "work" even on their own terms, so why is the US imposing them?