Tariff Turmoil
In the popular 1986 comedy film Ferris Buehller’s Day Off, Buehller skips high school to spend a day in Chicago with his girlfriend and a pal. One of the funniest parts of the film is an economics teacher’s memorably monotonous lecture about the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.
There was nothing funny about the Smoot-Hawley tariffs. The economy was sinking into depression, and Senators Reed Smoot (pictured) and Willis Hawley, both Republicans, thought 15-18 percent tariffs on a select third of imports would protect U.S. industries from foreign competition. President Hoover signed the bill despite warnings from senior economists.
The Smoot-Hawley tariffs didn’t cause the Great Depression but certainly made it worse. Within two years, U.S. imports fell by about 40 percent partly because unemployment meant many people didn’t have money to buy much but partly because tariffs made foreign goods more expensive.
According to Douglas Irwin, perhaps America’s leading expert on trade policy during the Great Depression, the tariff was seen by other countries as a hostile decision that led to resentment and retaliatory tariffs on American goods. Trade with America declined, which seriously delayed a global economic recovery. Tariffs also made domestic goods more expensive because of reduced foreign competition. Generally, tariffs are taxes on consumers regardless of where goods are produced.
Because the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were such a disaster, the U.S. has preferred free trade and rarely raised tariffs since 1930 until this year. While Smoot-Hawley was passed by Congress, this year’s tariffs were simply proclaimed by the president in response to an ill-defined “national emergency”—a power delegated to presidents by Congress in 1977 but never used until now. They have been repeatedly raised and lowered and even targeted at an Antarctic island inhabited only by penguins.
Businesses here and abroad require economic stability to make long-term plans, but instability rules the White House. Two federal courts blocked most of Trump’s tariffs last week, followed shortly by another court which temporarily allowed them. Clearly, the future of those tariffs is unclear.
What is clear is the low opinion of tariffs by Warren Buffett, perhaps the most successful American investor of modern times: “Trade should not be a weapon…. I do think that the more prosperous the rest of the world becomes … the more prosperous we’ll become, and the safer we’ll feel, and your children will feel someday.” “[We should] trade with the rest of the world, and we should do what we do best, and they should do what they do best.”
Tariffs turn others, even loyal allies like the EU, Canada, and Mexico, against us. Because we’re the world’s richest country, others wonder if there’s no end to American greed. The obvious play is to retaliate by levying tariffs on U.S. goods; trade becomes a game where everyone loses.
The president seems to believe that tariffs will bring revenue to the government to cover at least part of the cost of his $3.7 trillion “big, beautiful bill” to cut taxes, nearly all of it for the rich. Here’s a better idea: raise taxes significantly on incomes above half a million and even more on incomes in the top one percent.
A creative idea to raise revenue has been suggested by Joseph Ginocchio of Santa Fe, N.M., in a letter in the April 28 New Yorker. “Why not have corporations that benefit from government intellectual property [including university research funded by federal grants] pay royalties for using it? This would dramatically lighten the tax burden for individuals and small businesses.” Of course, corporations must be prohibited from passing on the cost of royalties to taxpayers, who already paid for the original research.