Trump’s Tariff Blueprint Called for ‘Careful Planning’ and ‘Precise Execution’
If you want to understand what President Donald Trump is trying to accomplish with his massive tariff hikes, the best place to start is probably a report published not long after Trump won last year’s election.
That essay, titled “A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System,” was authored by Stephen Miran, then a senior strategist at Hudson Bay Capital and a former Treasury Department official from the first Trump administration. He’s now one of the White House’s top economic advisors. The 41-page report is a concise (given the complexity of the issues involved) blueprint for what Miran called a “generational change in the international trade and financial systems” necessitated by an economic imbalance caused by an overvalued dollar.
Tariffs, Miran argued, are one of the means to that end. Raising tariffs could generate revenue and change the balance of the U.S. dollar versus other currencies in ways that help America offset the costs incurred by, for example, providing national security services to so much of the world.
To put it in more practical terms ripped from recent headlines: If the U.S. is expected to bear the burden of fighting the Houthis to keep shipping lanes in the Red Sea open, then it should find a way to offset those costs by taxing the trade that’s able to flow because of America’s security umbrella. We can’t set up a toll booth in the Red Sea, so tariffs are the next best thing.
As someone who doesn’t see trade as a zero-sum game and recognizes that global supply chains make everyone wealthier, I’m not particularly swayed by this idea. But it isn’t hard to see how Trump, who views everything as transactional (and who has been enamored with tariffs since the 1980s), would be into it.
Still
Article from Reason.com
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