On Thursday President Trump announced that the Commerce Department would investigate imports of steel to the United States. This falls under the Buy American campaign pledge. A lot of talk in the media is, of course, about the threat of Chinese steel to the United States. So I dug into the Census Bureau’s website and found their data on steel imports.
Well, it turns out that steel imports were already down by over 5 million tons before Trump took office. And from 2015 to 2016, China fell sharply from 7th to 10th in a ranking of our import partners. In fact the only country from whom we import significant amounts of steel to see a rise over that period was Mexico.
But we’ll probably need their steel to build the wall to keep out their steel.
I visualised the data in this datagraphic. Enjoy. And look for a later post today in the usual, light-hearted vein.
Credit for the data goes to the US Census Burea. The graphic is mine.
