Marco Rubio Used To Know How Tariffs Work. What Happened?
At a Republican presidential primary debate in January 2016, Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) succinctly explained why using tariffs as a foreign policy tool would backfire against Americans.
“We are all frustrated with what China is doing, but I think we need to be very careful with tariffs and here’s why,” Rubio said, directly challenging Donald Trump over his call for placing tariffs on goods imported from China.
“China doesn’t pay the tariff. The buyer pays the tariff,” Rubio explained. “If you send a tie or a shirt made in China into the United States, and an American goes to buy it in the store, and there is a tariff on it, [the tariff] gets passed on in the price to the consumer.”
In an essay published this week at The American Conservative, Rubio argued for exactly the opposite. Trump’s plan to place even more tariffs on China if elected to another term in the White House would be “good for the economy insofar as they counteract market inefficiencies created by adversarial trade practices,” Rubio writes, adding that it will “prevent or reverse offshoring, preserving America’s economic might and promoting domestic investment.”
The economics of tariffs have not changed in the past eight years. Rubio has.
The once-independent-minded senator from Florida has recently gone all-in on nationalist economics—presumably in an attempt to flatter Trump, a man Rubio once called a “dangerous con man.” The senator has authored other essays recently advocating for industrial policy (he supports the “right” kind of industrial policy, which would of course be very different from the wrong kind of industrial policy President Joe Biden is pursuing, even though it’s unclear how they would actually differ) and has publicly pushed back at critics who have called out his economic fallacies.
But the current version of Rubio is bound to lose this debate with his 2016 alter ego, who has the facts firmly on his side.
Indeed, just as Rubio predicted in 2016, the tariffs imposed by former President Donald Trump have been overwhelmingly paid by American businesses and consumers. Those groups “bore nearly the full cost of these tariffs because import prices increased at the same rate as the tariffs,” the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) fo
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