Tariffied

As part of its ongoing crusade to roll back the clock and return America to some mythical golden age, the Trump-Musk administration has just launched a new wave of tariffs against China, Canada and Mexico. These actions from the US, of course, immediately inspired a reciprocal wave of tariffs and restrictions from all those trading partners in return.

Despite the fantasy land of Donald Trump, who keeps on insisting that foreign governments will bear the burden all on their own and American consumers will never pay any price here, the economic reckoning from this self-imposed stupidity will be brutal. Stocks have already taken a significant tumble, and it's only going to get worse. Ordinary consumers will soon be seeing the impact as prices soar for everything from groceries and beer to electronics and automobiles.

Again, if you're not Donald Trump – and congratulations on that, by the way – this was all incredibly obvious. Yes, as the president keeps insisting, tariffs were a major pillar of the American economy during the Gilded Age, but that's not a point in their favor. Yes, the infamous "robber barons" of that era made their fortunes with protective tariffs in place, but for ordinary Americans that period was a brutal time of deep economic inequality and uncertainty in which they suffered considerably.

You only need to look over the list of depressions, recessions and financial "panics" in the late 19th and early 20th century to get a sense of how turbulent the time of tariffs was – the Panic of 1873 followed by the "Long Depression" from 1873-1879, then another Depression from 1882-1885, then two recessions in 1887-1888 and 1890-1891, the Panic of 1893, the Panic of 1896, then two more recessions in 1899-1900 and 1902-1904, the Panic of 1907, the Panic of 1910, etc. etc. There were, of course, a lot of reasons for the economic turmoil of these decades, but the idea that tariffs brought some sort of economic boom and stability is obviously laughable.

The people who lived through them understood this all too well. As early as the 1880s, the poet Walt Whitman wrote: “We ought to invite the world through an open door…. My God! are men always to go on clawing each other—always to go on taxing, stealing, warring…. That is what the tariff—the spirit of the tariff—means.”

Several disastrous decades later, tariffs were openly mocked as an outmoded and ineffective approach. The cartoon at the top of this post, for instance, comes from 1921 – when the country was reckoning with yet another Depression, in the wake of World War I – and depicts it as a snake oil cure pitched by out of touch politicians.

When the country slipped into the Great Depression at the end of the decade, the Republican old guard once again put their misguided faith in a protective tariff. "Congress passed the Tariff Bill," the comedian Will Rogers noted dejectedly in 1930. "They know it was a lot of hooey but they passed it all the same. The Tariff Bill is going to be great for everybody who don't buy anything or eat anything."

And indeed, the Depression that had been kicked off with the stock market's collapse in 1929 became markedly worse as a result of that now infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. If you need a refresher on its impact, here is a short lecture from former Nixon economist and actor Ben Stein:

This understanding of Smoot-Hawley as a strategic blunder that only harmed the American economy and only made the Depression much deeper was widely shared when that movie came out in 1986.

That same year, President Ronald Reagan said this in a radio address:

Millions of American jobs are tied to imports. The way to a better life is to open markets now closed, improve trading conditions, and to expand our exports. We learned that lesson half a century ago when we tried to balance the trade deficit by erecting a tariff wall around the United States. The Smoot-Hawley tariff ignited an international trade war and helped sink our country into the Great Depression.

Hell, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff was such an obvious loser that even Al Gore managed to dunk all over Ross Perot on a special episode of "Larry King Live" just by pulling out a framed photo of Smoot and Hawley like it was a cursed monkey's paw.

For nearly a century now, Americans from across the political spectrum agreed that tariffs were unthinkable.

But that all changed, now that we're being led by a man who doesn't think.

Brace yourselves.