Millions of American children are looking forward to Santa Claus’s visit and his sleigh full of presents. Timeless tradition? Harmless fun?
Not anymore. The United States has adopted a new philosophy about foreign trade under President Donald Trump, and jolly old St. Nick is desensitizing American kids to the dangers of trade deficits.
Here’s how Claus gains an illicit advantage and creates a trade deficit. Claus is not an American, and he brings his gifts from the North Pole (which is suspiciously close to Canada, a country that threatens U.S. national security). The gifts are produced by elves who don’t have the protections of U.S. labor laws in workshops that aren’t subject to U.S. environmental or safety standards. Claus has stolen jobs from American workers with his industrial policy, which uses Yuletide magic to subsidize the manufacturing and transportation of his exports. This unfair competition allows Claus to flood our country with toys priced lower than anyone else can produce them: $0.
American children have been trained not merely to accept but to celebrate the dumping of foreign goods, directly from Claus’s bottomless sack into their homes, without any government efforts to level the playing field for American producers. Fun as it may be, the Santa Claus tradition damages our national solidarity in the struggle for fair trading relationships. The gleeful acceptance of low-priced imports is only one of many symptoms of the failed neoliberal mindset wrecking this great nation.
At the time of the Founding Fathers, few American children believed in Santa Claus, and tariffs were the largest source of federal revenue. It wasn’t until 1912 that the U.S. Post Office began to officially process letters written to Claus asking for presents, a tradition that had only become widespread a few decades prior. Our history proves that America can thrive without Claus’s activity.
Trading relationships are fair only if the exchange of goods is balanced or America has a surplus. Which is to say: Americans must export as much, or more, to foreigners as they export to us. Yet in exchange for all those toys, the only things Americans export to Claus is cookies. The paunchy pillager should at the very least commit to buying a few hundred billion dollars’ worth of American oil and natural gas — or better yet, coal — to take a step toward balanced trade.
Claus should commit to moving some of his toy production to the U.S. That way, every request from a child sitting on his lap at the mall would help create good-paying jobs in the Rust Belt. The white-bearded interloper also uses a foreign-domiciled vessel to make deliveries in the U.S. when he jumps from house to house. Efficient as it may be, Kriss Kringle’s sleigh and reindeer operation denies jobs to the hardworking American truck drivers, train engineers and union dockworkers who would transport the gifts instead.
Higher production and distribution costs might result in fewer toys, but as Trump has said before, girls don’t really need so many dolls anyway. Parents can have a teaching moment when they explain to their kids around the tree that the short-term pain of a less fun Christmas is worth the long-term gain of national sovereignty and a new golden age for manufacturing.
The transition away from the Santa Claus tradition won’t be easy for many families, but the era of outsourcing and trade deficits is over. Young children are too impressionable to risk developing fond sentiments about low-priced goods produced abroad. They might grow up to support free trade.
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