“The 2018-20 tariffs raised consumer prices for goods like washing machines, cars, and electronics. According to economists at the Federal Reserve and several universities, American consumers bore nearly the full cost, while protected domestic industries captured only modest benefits.
With a much broader set of tariffs now on the table, lower-income families who spend the largest shares of their income on goods—and who have been badly hurt from the recent inflation—will likely suffer the most. That’s a dangerous proposition in an economy already wrestling with persistent cost-of-living pressures.
Here’s where things go from damaging to disastrous: If the administration follows through with both expensive new tariffs and more bailouts while simultaneously extending expiring tax cuts and adding new tax breaks without corresponding spending cuts, the result will be a fiscal black hole.
It’s true that Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency are cutting spending and that the administration is rolling back many of the costly regulations inflicted by the Biden administration. It also wants to free the energy sector and generate more energy abundance. But it will take a long time to realize the benefits of these efforts, if they ever materialize. After all, many of these changes require congressional action, and Congress of late has been missing in action.
Trump’s tariff strategy is worse than a gamble; it’s a sure-fire loser. Experience proves that policies motivated by economic nationalism are all pain and no gain. The details of the long-run damage remain to be revealed. However, in the short term, we know for a fact that Liberation Day will hurt farmers, burden consumers, and further bloat the budget deficit—all oh-so-misleadingly in the name of “America First.”
What America really needs are open markets, fiscal responsibility, and stable trade relationships—not a rerun and enlargement of the last trade war.”
“For weeks, the White House has been using the word reciprocal to describe these new tariffs. “They charge us, we charge them,” is how Trump described the tariffs on Wednesday.
If that’s true, then the U.S. should be lowering its trade barriers with Singapore, which charges zero tariffs on most U.S. imports. (Indeed, Singapore’s very existence is proof of the power of free trade. It has become one of the world’s wealthiest nations not because it built a ton of factories or engaged in a lot of protectionist policies but by embracing low tariffs and free trade.)
Instead, Trump is slapping a 10 percent tariff on imports from Singapore. So much for “reciprocity.”
You could say the same thing about Israel, which earlier this week decided to eliminate all tariffs on American imports in advance of Trump’s tariff announcement. Did Trump respond to that move by lowering all American tariffs on imports from Israel? He did not: Israeli goods are now subject to a 17 percent tariff, per the list published Wednesday by the White House.”
“Heard and McDonald Islands, an uninhabited Australian territory, will now pay a 10 percent tariff on any exported goods the penguins there manage to export to the U.S.
So will the British Indian Ocean Territory—a U.K. overseas territory that (thanks to a mid-century ethnic cleansing) is depopulated but for military personnel and contractors at the island’s British and American bases.
The White House’s list also includes the French overseas departments and regions of French Guiana, Reunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Mayotte—all of which are legally part of France proper, and therefore have their trade policy set by the European Union.
How exactly uninhabited islands and administrative regions of France ended up on the White House’s tariff list isn’t exactly clear.
All do have their own two-letter country code on the United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations (UN/LODE), which is used to facilitate trade and generate trade data.
It’s possible then that the White House just cut and pasted from this list to create its own tariff targets.
To be sure, there are about 50 countries and territories on the UN/LODE list that don’t appear on the Trump administration’s tariff list. The White House’s list is at least curated enough to exclude U.S. overseas territories, the Vatican, and Palestine—all of which have their own UN/LODE code.”
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“Amazingly, the inclusion of uninhabited territories and administrative regions of larger countries and trade blocs fails to even match the administration’s own protectionist logic.
If the new tariffs are supposed to equalize bilateral trade balances between the U.S. and every other country, it makes little sense that the White House also levy tariffs on places that have no economic activity.
It also doesn’t make a lot of sense that it would tariff European overseas regions that don’t set their own trade policy.
If the White House is trying to create an equal balance of exports and imports with French Guiana, as opposed to France as a whole, why not also have Paris-specific tariffs?”
“trade isn’t some state-level exchange in which one government mugs another. It takes place voluntarily between individuals and businesses.”
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“”In their criticism of global trade and imports, Vance and the GOP platform don’t mention several important things: the American consumer, private property, and the freedom that people should enjoy to voluntarily exchange goods and services,” he noted. “Some folks call this liberty and the pursuit of happiness: people freely choosing to buy and sell what they want, not what the government dictates.”
And what do we call voluntary exchanges between willing participants? Well, as economist Roy Cordato wrote for the John Locke Foundation in 2018, “all trade, by definition, is reciprocal. It is best to think of a trade as simply two parties coming together for mutual gain with each of them giving up something that they possess for something that they want more.”
So, in order to eliminate trade deficits with other nations that aren’t really a problem to begin with, the Trump administration is hiking tariffs to raise the cost of imported goods so that Americans will buy less of them. That’s interference in the free reciprocal exchanges chosen by consumers and businesses. And the price of that interference comes out of Americans’ pockets. That’s because, as the Tax Foundation’s Alex Durante warns, tariffs are taxes that, while partially paid by foreign firms, are mostly a burden for people in the countries that impose them—especially as they rise to the heights we now see.
“If the US imposes a large enough tariff, the resulting reduction in economic activity would also entail a meaningful increase in unemployment,” adds Durante.”
“The Trump administration has, for the fourth time in history, invoked the war-time Alien Enemies Act of 1798, even though our nation is not at war—and its last use remains one of the most shameful episodes in American history.
That involved President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 in 1942. It was the basis for the internment of around 112,000 people of Japanese descent, 70,000 of whom were American citizens.”
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“For years, we’ve endured constitutional conservatives’ bloviating about the importance of protecting the sacred principles enshrined in our Constitution. Those include the separation of powers—legislative, executive and judicial checks on one another—and due process. Many of these hypocrites are defending the administration’s policies and bashing a judge for halting the hasty airlift of accused criminal aliens to a prison run by a banana-republic strongman—a directive the president promptly ignored.
Perhaps most of these deportees are criminals and a threat (unlike peaceful Japanese residents who posed no threat whatsoever). They still deserve due process—their day in court, so to speak—to prove they have indeed violated the law. Constitutional conservatives of all people should understand that the government gets things wrong and individuals deserve protection from arbitrary actions by its agents.
We’ve already seen examples of immigrants who were deported based on the government allegedly mistaking a soccer tattoo for gang insignia. Let’s say you were walking around and, based on your attire or ethnic background, the police suspected you were a gang-banger and took you to jail. Wouldn’t your first call be to your lawyer? Don’t you deserve due process to prove you were a passerby before being shipped to Pelican Bay? (And non-citizens generally are considered persons under the Constitution—and also deserve due process.)
The administration isn’t just ignoring these constitutional due-process protections but seems to be actively mocking them. “What were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of (Tren de Aragua)—what was their due process?”” asked Tom Homan, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Murder and rape always are horrific, but everyone still gets a trial to, you know, prove they actually committed the crime.”
China tends to make cheaper things than lots of Americans can buy. Americans tend to make more expensive things. The average Chinese person has less disposable income than the average American, so it doesn’t make sense for them to buy more from the U.S. than the U.S. from China.
“When it comes to implementing those tariffs, Miran repeatedly stresses the need to move deliberately and in ways that “are minimally disruptive to markets and the economy.”
“There is a path by which the Trump Administration can reconfigure the global trading and financial systems to America’s benefit,” Miran wrote at the end of his essay, “but it is narrow, and will require careful planning, precise execution, and attention to steps to minimize adverse consequences.”
“The “reciprocal” tariffs that President Donald Trump announced this week are based on a flagrant fallacy: the idea that there is something inherently suspicious about trade deficits. Unlike many of the positions that Trump has adopted as a politician, this one seems heartfelt and long predates his presidential campaigns. His comments on the subject during the last four decades reflect an unshakable belief that international trade is “fair” only when the dollar value of imports from any given country happens to match the dollar value of U.S. exports to that country.
Trump’s long history of economic illiteracy suggests he is determined to pursue this trade war, which features import taxes that are much steeper and far broader than the ones he imposed during his first term, no matter how much pain it inflicts on American consumers and businesses.”