Colin Grabow
Colin Grabow, Scott Lincicome, and Kyle Handley
For all of President Donald Trump’s talk about reciprocity, it turns out that he just wanted higher tariffs. After weeks of threatening “reciprocal” tariffs to match the higher tariffs and trade barriers of US trading partners, Trump announced yesterday that the United States was slapping a 10 percent tariff on everyone. Dozens more countries face still higher tariffs—up to 50 percent—for alleged trade transgressions.
The result appears to be the highest US tariffs since 1909, already ten times the size of those in place before Trump took office and at an average rate exceeding even that imposed by the infamous Smoot-Hawley Act, which is widely blamed for prolonging the Great Depression. Early analysis suggests the tariff hike amounts to an annual tax increase of over $100 billion per year, with income- and growth-sapping effects sure to be felt by virtually all Americans. And, of course, it was all imposed with mere days’ notice and without any congressional input or public comment.
So how, pray tell, did the Trump administration arrive at massive tariffs that it alleges offset foreign trade barriers of an equivalent amount?
You have to read it to believe it.
An Unserious (at Best) Approach to “Reciprocity”
As our colleagues Jeremy Horpedahl and Phil Magness detailed, the administration—by its own admission—did not conduct a careful and thorough analysis of foreign tariff and nontariff barriers that necessitate such a huge tax hike. Instead, the US Trade Representative’s office admits it simply assumed that US trade deficits—overall and with individual trading partners—reflect tariff and non-tariff factors that “prevent trade from balancing” and then calculated a tariff rate to bring bilateral trade into equilibrium.
Yet no serious international economist would make such an assumption. As Cato scholars and many others have long documented, trade balances are in general driven not by trade policies but by savings and investment (which are themselves driven by policy and non-policy factors). » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/more-about-trumps-sham-reciprocal-tariffs