How special interests hide the true costs of tariffs

Under the current system, if Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross decides to protect his friends and business interests in the steel industry, he can ignore the damage that his own data show the tariffs will inflict on some of the 6.5 million workers in America’s steel-consuming industries. His sole lawful obligation is to demonstrate that the economic fortunes of the 140,000 steel employees will be promoted by the tariffs. (The same story — available data on negative downstream effects ignored by the administration — applies to the tariffs on Chinese goods.)

Even worse is the legislatively required bias that the United States International Trade Commission must exercise against American consumers of imports when deciding whether or not to impose duties on foreign producers accused of selling their goods for less than they should or selling unduly subsidized products. These trade remedies are called antidumping, and countervailing duties and deciding whether or not to impose them is a core function of the I.T.C. As my colleague Christine McDaniel, a trade economist and former adviser to the I.T.C. chairman, and I exposed in a recent paper published by the Mercatus Center, when I.T.C. commissioners make their determinations in such cases, they’re actually forbidden by statute from considering the impact of these so-called trade remedies on downstream industries — those consumers of goods and services hit by the tariffs.