If we are to take Donald Trump seriously, we are to believe that he truly believes that tariffs are vital for the economic well-being of Americans. If we take his supporters seriously, it’s not necessarily that he thinks tariffs are a good idea but he mainly wants to use them as a negotiating tool.

So which is it, and are either true?

We already know that tariffs are in fact a terrible idea, just as we know that things like rent control or price controls are bad ideas. Both in theory and practice, these policies fail. Yet are superficially appealing to those with no appreciation for the reality of trade-offs.

Trump is such a person. While he has declared the word tariff “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” he’s at the same time indicated he doesn’t really know how tariffs work. “It’s not going to be a cost to you. It’s going to be a cost to another country,” he said at a rally in September.

In case it needs to be spelled out: tariffs are taxes on imported goods, with the importers paying the taxes and passing along the higher costs to you, the consumer.

We also know from Trump’s first term that his tariffs did far more harm than good. Overall reductions in employment, negative impacts to GDP and higher costs for consumers. You know, the exact opposite of what a successful economic policy would look like.

So, if Trump really does like tariffs, he’s deeply mistaken, wrong and devoted to a policy that only hurts Americans. If that’s supposed to make America great, it’s a mysterious way of going about it.

Which then brings us to the other possibility, which is that Trump’s tariffs are actually just a grand trick to negotiate with other countries.

Well, we know for a fact that his tariffs against China did nothing to change the practices of the Chinese government.

We also know that, despite his renegotiation of NAFTA in his first term, he then threatened Canada and Mexico with tariffs anyway and then backed down after modest promises from the two countries that had mostly already been committed to beforehand. In December, Canada already announced a border security plan that Trump later pretended on Truth Social was the result of his February tariff threat.

As of this writing, Trump is set to unleash even more tariffs. To what end? Who knows?

The plain fact is that global trade has greatly enriched humanity while providing Americans with an abundance of goods at affordable prices. Making things more expensive for American consumers and businesses to either try and help them or batter other countries for vaguely defined policy aims isn’t smart or effective leadership.

It’s also a reminder of how dysfunctional the federal government truly is. The Constitution specifically empowers Congress to regulate trade, yet Congress has ceded considerable authority to the executive branch. If we had a well-functioning federal government with checks and balances, no president would be able to run wild with tariffs and tariff threats.

But we don’t and so Americans and the world have to deal with Trump’s incoherent tariff schemes.

— From Tribune News Service