Joe Biden Once Understood Why Tariffs Are Bad. Then He Got Trade Policy Amnesia.
In the January 2025 issue of Reason, we’re giving performance reviews of Joe Biden’s presidency. Click here to read the other entries.
While he was interviewing for the job, President Joe Biden demonstrated an acute awareness of how tariffs work. It’s worrisome that he seems to have forgotten that—or, worse, chosen to ignore it—since he’s been president.
In June 2019, Biden correctly described the effects of higher taxes on imports. Donald Trump, who was president at the time, “doesn’t get the basics,” Biden said. “He thinks tariffs are being paid by China. Any beginning econ student…could tell you the American people are paying his tariffs.” Around the same time, he criticized Trump’s reliance on tariffs as a tool of foreign policy, saying that higher taxes on Americans was a “shortsighted” way to combat China’s “abuses.” In place of his predecessor’s zero-sum view on trade, Biden advocated for a “united front of allies” to take on China while opening up other markets.
Biden’s résumé seemed to confirm he had a firm grasp of trade policy. As a member of the Senate in the 1990s, Biden supported the North American Free Trade Agreement. During his time as vice president (2009–2017), Biden helped organize the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a planned-but-never-implemented 12-nation trade deal that would have lowered tariffs, increased American access to foreign goods, and boosted the economic fortunes of those other nations. The de
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