Trump Proved ‘Experts’ Wrong About Tariffs

Last April, Paul Krugman wrote the following about the reciprocal tariffs President Trump had just announced: “This is a much bigger shock to the economy than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930.” Krugman trotted out that trite analogy not because he really believed Trump’s tariffs were comparable to Smoot-Hawley, but because he knew his Substack subscribers would vaguely recall reading about the latter in high school and feel intelligent. Six months later it’s blindingly obvious that Trump was right about the tariffs and Krugman’s portentous predictions were utterly moronic.

It goes without saying, of course, that the corporate media parroted Krugman’s apocalyptic warnings about the tariffs without acknowledging that Trump’s Democrat predecessors had also deployed them. President Obama, for example, imposed a 35 percent tariff on Chinese tires and President Biden levied a 25 percent tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum. Yet Americans were repeatedly told the Trump tariffs would inevitably lead to a global trade war in which the United States economy would be wrecked by retaliatory tariffs that would plunge the country into a deep recession. As Matthew Lynn patiently explained it Friday in the Washington Post:

When President Donald Trump imposed huge tariffs on imports in April, the mainstream economic establishment and the big forecasters on Wall Street were virtually united on one point: The tariffs would trigger stagflation, at best, and a deep slump, at worst. It sounded like life would resemble a post-apocalypse Netflix series  … These experts who purport to understand how the economy functions saw the tariffs as a catastrophe. They were wrong; they need to admit it.

Fat chance. The doomsayers are still making preposterous claims about the tariffs. Glenn C. Altschuler, Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University, ridiculously cited a public opinion poll yesterday in The Hill: “In a poll taken in August by the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of respondents did not approve of Trump’s tariff policies. And 55 percent indicated the levies will have a negative impact on them, their families and the country.” This tells you nothing about the economic effects of tariffs. All it really demonstrates is that the long suffering public has been subjected to an endless bombardment of anti-tariff propaganda.