I would impose tariffs to confront China's massive theft of America's jobs.

The rhetoric that you hear from Donald Trump and Joe Biden on trade with China, it's similar in a lot of important ways.

They share the same overall philosophy, which is that the U.S. has done too much of it in the past.

President Biden and Donald Trump are both issuing blueprints to compete against China, disrupting the free trade status quo Washington has held for decades.

President Trump has gone all in.

President Biden has been more targeted.

Here's a look at the 2024 election foes' different trade strategies and how they could affect U.S. consumers.

To understand the trade relations between China and the U.S., let's first rewind to 2001, the year China joined the World Trade Organization.

Once China had joined the WTO, a lot of uncertainty about what would happen in the relationship disappeared.

This step represents great progress for China, the WTO, and the world trading system.

Between 2001 and the Great Financial Crisis, the Chinese economy underwent enormous growth and productivity growth and a huge export surge.

A lot of foreign investment went into China, and a lot of the export surge was driven by so-called foreign-invested enterprises who used China as a processing platform for exports.

U.S. imports from China grew more than fivefold over two decades, reaching a high of more than $560 billion in 2022.

At the same time, we saw the beginning of what turned out to be a pretty rapid decline in manufacturing employment in the U.S.

And this decline in employment has been linked to opening of trade with China.

That's the so-called China shock narrative.

While economists are divided over the magnitude of the China shock, many agree that There was this, you know, massive flood of cheap Chinese goods that came into the United States, and factories and workers in the United States that were building those same things suddenly couldn't compete.

That was a kind of political undercurrent that really jumped into center stage when Donald Trump ran for presidency the first time in 2016.

Because we can't continue to allow China to rape our country.

And that's what they're doing.

During the Trump administration in 2018, the U.S. levied tariffs on roughly $360 billion worth of Chinese imports from electronics to toys to apparel.

His approach to China was completely different than what came before.

About two thirds of our imports from China were now subject to these large taxes.

So that fundamentally changed how we viewed trade with China.

Biden, despite divisions within his own administration, has kept Trump's tariffs in place, even amid high inflation.

One of the key initiatives under the Biden administration has been trying to build up a clean energy industry in the United States.

And at the same time, China has been really massively expanding their production of some of these same clean energy goods.

There's been within the Biden administration increasing concern about how China is directing its economy.

That concern was clear in May when Biden elevated the Trump era tariffs on an array of imports.

Among the increases were Chinese electric vehicles, which went from 25 percent to 100 percent.

Steel and aluminum products increased from 7.5 percent to 25 percent.

Solar cells rose from 25 percent to 50 percent.

The White House said the new tariffs would apply to roughly $18 billion worth of products from China.

China heavily subsidized all these products, pushing Chinese companies to produce far more than the rest of the world can absorb, and then dumping the excess products onto the market at unfairly low prices.

In a sense or very real way, these tariffs are a counterpart to the industrial policy that we've been doing at home.

We can't be producing autos and solar and even semiconductors and then still importing very low cost items that undercut the production that's being done in the United States.

You know, most of us saw it coming.

It's like the other hand of the industrial policy.

A tariff is a tax typically intended to limit the amount of an imported good and protect domestic jobs.

Who ultimately pays for it is a long running debate.

The economic evidence suggests that the current tariffs, rather than forcing Chinese sellers to charge less, were largely passed on to American buyers.

The White House argues Biden's trade plan is more targeted than Trump's, who has made it clear that he's willing to slap on even higher tariffs if he becomes the next president.

I will put a 200 percent tax on every car that comes in from those plants.

Among his proposals, Trump has suggested imposing a 10 percent levy on global imports, and that tariff goes to at least 60 percent on all imports from China, roughly $430 billion worth of goods.

Americans are bearing the burden of these tariffs.

Low income people are burdened most heavily, middle income second heavily and the richest people the least heavily.

Now, why is that?

You might think, well, rich person spends a lot of money, so they must be paying a lot of these taxes.

Well, that's true, but it's a very small share of their income.

Trump defended his proposals in a March interview with CNBC, saying that tax cuts could help offset his planned tariff increases.

China is right now our boss.

They are the boss of the United States, almost like we're a subsidiary of China.

In recent months, Beijing has turned to Europe for a more accommodating stance on China.

Between the United States and China, a kind of key constituency and almost swing vote between the two of them is the European Union.

Europe, for what it's worth, does share broadly some of the American concerns about Chinese economic practices.

But there is still overall in Europe a hesitance to go down the exact same road that the United States is going down when it comes to China.

Whether Biden would institute additional tariffs against China during a second term is unclear.

A spokesperson for Biden's re-election campaign told the Journal that Biden is taking a targeted approach to protect American workers and industry.

A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to the Journal's request for comment.

Well, tariffs definitely increase prices, so that's a negative that both candidates would probably want to avoid, but they can't.

So they have to decide how much they want to use tariffs as an instrument.

No matter who wins this election, whether it's Trump or Biden, we will be living in the United States where the most powerful people in the country think about these fundamental issues in a very different way than they did even 10 years ago.

I think that that kind of guiding goal of building more things in the United States, making more things in the United States and not relying on China will be here to stay.