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Brace Yourself: Trump’s Trade War is About to Make Americans Poorer
By Will Marshall
Founder and President of the Progressive Policy Institute
for The Hill
Move over, Smoot and Hawley. President Trump has anointed himself America’s greatest protectionist, and he’s launching a global trade war to prove it.
On Wednesday, Trump slapped a minimum 10 percent tariff on all imports, plus additional “reciprocal” tariffs on 60 other countries that have the temerity to sell us things we want to buy. He dubbed it “Liberation Day” to mark the freeing of Americans from the supposedly oppressive burden of trading with others.
Steeped in nostalgia for America’s industrial heyday, Trump imagines he can unilaterally restructure the world’s economy. The president can sign all the executive orders he pleases, but he can’t throw history into reverse or repeal basic economics.
His universal tariffs constitute a massive tax hike on U.S. consumers, hitting everything from European medicines and Mexican fruits and vegetables to Vietnamese shoes and German cars. Likewise for Japanese or Korean steel and Canadian aluminum and electricity.
Meanwhile, our $3 trillion export sector — satellites and medical devices, soybeans and wine, movies and telemedicine — will shrink as other countries inevitably retaliate by hiking their tariffs.
Unless Trump relents, choking off trade with high tariffs will send prices soaring again, slow down economic growth, make Americans poorer and embroil us in mutually ruinous global trade wars with friends and allies.
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