Trump Is Giving Everyone What They Want In the Dumbest Way Possible
A range of factions with mutually exclusive policy goals entered the Trump White House hoping the president would prioritize their particular political project.
Dynamists want to cut regulation and unleash economic growth. Many different stripes of protectionists want to end past decades’ regime of global free-ish trade. Foreign policy restrainers want to get us out of overseas conflicts. Foreign policy hawks want to start some more.
It’s a credit to President Donald Trump’s slapdash style and personal charisma that he managed to convince every camp of this heterogeneous coalition that they’d get what they wanted from his second term.
More incredibly, he’s making everyone’s dreams come true. The only catch is that he’s doing it in the dumbest way possible.
This past Wednesday was “Liberation Day,” when the president announced a sweeping regime of bilateral “reciprocal tariffs” on almost every country in the world.
People who wanted tariffs certainly got them, but the details belie any coherent logic behind the scheme.
It’s hard to claim these tariffs are being done to counter Chinese influence (as some in the Trump administration want to use tariff policy to do) if China’s 32 percent tariff rate is roughly equivalent to Taiwan’s 32 percent and less than Chinese rival Vietnam’s 46 percent.
Nor can one claim that these tariffs are about fair trade, whereby we only have free trade with countries that have free trade with us, given the formula the administration is using to calculate the “reciprocal” tariffs. The White House is simply dividing our trade deficit with each country by their imports to us.
Arch-tariff defender Oren Cass has heroically attempted to defend these tariff rates by arguing that trade deficits by themselves are a good proxy for unbalanced trade policies.
Yet even Cass has conceded that under a balanced system of trade, the U.S. would run trad
Article from Reason.com
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