Donald Trump’s Looney Tunes Trade Policy
In an amusing display of British pride and solipsism, the venerable Times of London once ran the headline “Fog in Channel – Continent Cut Off.”
Overly arrogant individuals sometimes find it difficult to recognize that they are not the center of the universe, and that instead they might actually be considerably less large and powerful than those they intend to overawe, cut off, or isolate.
This sort of notion was also famously expressed in a Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoon I remember seeing during my childhood. One of the Looney Tunes characters—I forget which one—was perched on the branch of a tree and idiotically decided to destroy his adversary by sawing it off. Since cartoons may easily defy physical laws, his ridiculous plan actually succeeded and that branch remained suspended in mid-air while the rest of the tree suddenly plummeted to the ground. But real life is considerably different than what was portrayed by Warner Brothers cartoonists.
Some may disagree. I’ve sometimes wondered whether the surprising trade policies that President Donald Trump announced over the last couple of weeks might have been inspired by those Bugs Bunny cartoons of the 1950s. Perhaps he assumed that they accurately portrayed real life events and decided to apply that same strategy to America’s international trade problems.
Certainly the sudden, unilateral application of new tariffs against every other country in the world—ranging from a stiff minimum of 10% against the entire human race to a China rate that ultimately reached an absurd 145%—seemed more like something out of a cartoon than normal economic policy planning.
The initial tariff rates shown in the chart that Trump held up at his April 2nd announcement produced a jaw-dropping reaction by nearly all economic observers. I suspect that many of them may have wondered if he’d somehow gotten his dates confused and the whole exercise had actually been intended as an April Fools’ joke.
I was recently interviewed by a right-wing British podcaster named Mark Collett, and he suggested that Trump’s erratic and mercurial political decisions reminded him of the Roman Emperor Caligula, leading me to concur with his historical analogy.
Caligula is probably best known for announcing that he would appoint his horse Incitatus to the consulship, the highest political office of the Roman government, and also for declaring himself to be a living god. But I think that if Trump had given his favorite dog or cat a Cabinet post and even Tweeted out a few fanciful claims regarding his own divinity, the negative impact upon America’s position in the world might have been considerably less damaging than what was caused by his outrageously bizarre tariff proposal.
Tariffs are just a type o
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