President Trump’s new proposal to erect a wall — this one a tariff-fueled steel and aluminum curtain — masks an inconvenient truth: The U.S. steel industry has been holding its own, thanks to advances in productivity and the spread of cheap natural gas and gas-fired electricity.
Trump has called his tariffs a way to halt the slide in U.S. jobs. Yet the slide in U.S. steelworker jobs has in large part been the result of increases in efficiency.