Tariff Foolishness Has Nothing To Do With Tariffs

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Last Updated on: 3rd April 2025, 01:00 pm

Yesterday, the reactive two-year-old masquerading as the president of the United States announced a breathtaking array of new tariffs designed to punish America’s friends and reward its enemies. Economists are tying themselves in knots trying to explain how these tariffs work, but they are barking up the wrong tree, according to historian Heather Cox Richardson. The Guardian has the full list of tariffs. It includes a group of uninhabited volcanic islands near Antarctica, covered in glaciers and home to penguins.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which form an external territory of Australia, are among the remotest places on Earth, accessible only via a two week boat voyage from Perth on Australia’s west coast. They are completely uninhabited, with the last visit from people believed to be nearly 10 years ago. Nevertheless, they have now been hit with tariffs even though nobody lives there and there is no commercial activity on them. Anthony Albanese, the prime minister of Australia, said after the full list of tariffs was announced, “Nowhere on Earth is safe.”

Paul Krugman, who is a Nobel Laureate in economics, wrote on Substack after the tariffs were announced, the so-called president is claiming the rest of the world is placing very high tariffs on US products and that he’s imposing “reciprocal” tariffs that are only half as much. Krugman says the numbers touted by the president are “completely crazy. You have to wonder whether Elon Musk’s Dunning-Kruger kids are now producing tariff numbers.” He points out that the EU and the US generally have low tariffs. In fact the average tariff the EU charges on US goods is less than 3%.

“So where does this 39 percent number come from? I have no idea,” Krugman says. “Many people speculated that Trump would count value added taxes as tariffs, even though they aren’t. European producers selling to the EU market pay the same VAT as US producers, so it doesn’t discriminate and therefore isn’t protectionist. But even if you get that wrong, EU VAT rates are in the vicinity of 20 percent, so you still can’t get anywhere close to 39 percent.”

Historian Heather Cox Richardson noted on Substack today that financial journalist James Surowiecki claims the White House “just took our trade deficit with [each] country and divided it by the country’s exports to us,” a process he called “extraordinary nonsense.” Washington Post economic writer Catherine Rampell said she was reluctant to amplify Surowiecki’s theory that the tariff rates were based on such a “dumb calculation,” but then the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative confirmed it.

In his Rose Garden speech, the alleged president said, “For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. But it is not going to happen anymore.” He claimed his tariffs would create “the golden age of America.” To which former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers posted, “Never before has an hour of Presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much. The best estimate of the loss from tariff policy is now [close] to $30 trillion or $300,000 per family of four.” Former vice president Mike Pence slammed his old boss by saying, “The Trump Tariff Tax is the largest peacetime tax hike in US history.”

The tariffs announced on April 2 are higher than expected and business leaders are alarmed. Richardson writes that JPMorgan analysts said they “view the full implementation of these policies as a substantial macro economic shock not currently incorporated in our forecasts” and that “these policies, if sustained, would likely push the US and global economy into recession this year.” Economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations agreed. He told David J. Lynch and Jeff Stein of the Washington Post, “In the short run, the effect is probably a recession. It’s going to raise the price of so many goods that can’t be made in the United States. In the long run, it’s a vision of the U.S. that is very isolated from the world.”

Only one country was spared the onslaught of new US tariffs — Russia. Recently the US lifted sanctions against senior Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev to allow him to travel to Washington to meet with US special envoy Steve Witkoff for what CNN refers to as “talks on strengthening relations between the two countries as they seek to end the war in Ukraine.” The so-called president has always had a special relationship with Russia, as this latest move makes abundantly clear.

Tariffs As A Political Tool

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said the tariffs make no economic sense because “[t]hey aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.” He suggests they are a way to make private industry dependent on the president the same way he has tried to make law firms and universities dependent on him. Industries and companies “will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.” He warned that “[t]he tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship…[s]o that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win — the economy improves and dissent disappears.”

Were you under the impression that tariffs are the exclusive responsibility of Congress according to the Constitution? If so, you are correct, except for one thing. For decades, Congress has been only too happy to offload its responsibilities onto the shoulders of whoever would take them, whether the president or the welter of administrative agencies that has grown up since the days of  FDR and the New Deal. Why get people mad at you to the point where they vote you out of office when you can simply pass the buck and blame everything on someone else?

As part of its desire to offload its responsibilities, Congress in 1977 passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the president to impose tariffs if he declares a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act. On April 2, the crybaby president did precisely that by declaring a “national emergency to increase our competitive edge, protect our sovereignty, and strengthen our national and economic security.”

Congress has the power to end any such emergency declaration, but first it would need to find where it hid its cojones. Four Republican senators — Susan Collins, Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul — voted with their colleagues on the other side of the aisle to pass such a resolution, but the cowards in the House, who fear the president’s wrath if they do not kowtow to him, will refuse to vote on the measure.

Richardson writes that the president with his tariffs is undermining the system of global trade that has fostered international cooperation since World War II. CNN global economic analyst Rana Foroohar told CNN’s John Vause: “This is Trump saying…I am going to overturn globalization as we’ve known it.” She added: “I’m hoping it doesn’t push the US and the world into recession.”

That’s not all he is doing. Like the tyrant he is, his every waking moment is spent in thinking up ways to make everyone bend the knee and swear eternal fealty to him. He has brought America’s oldest and most prestigious universities and several of its most powerful law firms to heel with threats of economic punishments. Anyone who will agree to burnishing his halo can get special treatment, like the Colstrip coal-fired generating station in Montana. It is ranked as the dirtiest thermal generating station in America because of the clouds of fine particulates it spews on anyone downwind. It was scheduled to close soon, but has sought an exemption because of the fake declaration by the enfant terrible in the White House of a so-called “energy emergency.”

Chaos makes the one creating it more powerful. Elon Musk may be the richest human in history, but the Moron of Mar-A-Loco wants to be known as the most powerful person on Earth. Sadly, in a blink of an eye in geological terms, he will be gone, but the damage caused by his quest for power will last for decades. He may well go down in history as America’s dumbest president, although William McKinley — one of his heroes — is in the running for that honor as well.

Tariffs are just part of the plan to make this president a legend in his own mind. What we are witnessing may well be the end of the United States as we know it, something this maniac will wear as a badge of honor. While the world cries out for cooperation, he has thrown a Molotov cocktail into the gears of international relations. The US is now ruled by the American Taliban, a group whose ideology is rooted in a time centuries ago. The lights of learning and liberty are going out all across America and we are left to wonder if they will ever come back on.