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TARIFFS, SCHMARIFFS  
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Harold Meyerson
April 3, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Trump rewards the real offshorers with trillions in tax cuts. _

A truck is loaded with a shipping container at a depot in
Johannesburg, South Africa, April 3, 2025., Themba Hadebe/AP Photo

 

Well, we won’t be played for suckers by Laos and Liechtenstein
anymore. That’s a load off my mind.

As of Tuesday, Laotian imports will come complete
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a 48 percent tariff; as for Liechtenstein, it’ll only be 37 percent.

What, you may wonder, did Laos and Liechtenstein do to cause the drop
in domestic production here in the United States, and to build a world
economy based on global capital’s free trade? Are they major
producers of governmentally subsidized imports to our shores? Did they
play a key role in building the World Trade Organization? Did they
lobby our Congress to pass NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations
with China? Did they make under-the-table payoffs to the board members
at Apple to relocate a chunk of its Chinese production to other
Southeast Asian nations once Chinese wages had risen well above those
in its less-developed neighbors?

Actually, no.

It wasn’t largesse from Laos or lobbying from Liechtenstein (which
didn’t even have an embassy in the U.S. until 2002, years after both
those trade deals had become law) that prompted Congress to enact
those devastating deals. To be sure, Laos did export $36 million worth
of leather footwear and $32 million worth of knitted hats to our
shores in 2023. For its part, Liechtenstein, though home to just
40,000 people, is a major exporter of dentist’s implements.

So, who did create this nefarious world order? Where do we find the
prime movers of those policy decisions so injurious to America’s
working and middle classes? Why, on Wall Street and our corporate
C-suites, of course. Once Ronald Reagan cut taxes on the rich to a
level where big-time investors realized they could amass huge wealth
from shareholding, the New Deal social contract, which had dealt
workers in to rising American prosperity, was unceremoniously scrapped
(though, come to think of it, there were presidential signing
ceremonies for the tax cuts and the trade deals). So began a much more
intense war on unions, a much greater flight to low-wage nations, and
much higher CEO pay, most of it coming from the shares they were
given. So ended any sentimental loyalty that Wall Street and the CEOs
may have extended to American workers; indeed, the model American CEO
of the last two decades of the 20th century was General Electric’s
Jack Welch, who famously said he’d prefer a system where you’d
have “every plant you own on a barge” that could float to
whichever country had the lowest wages and taxes at any particular
time. It was Welch and his peers who are responsible for creating that
“barge economy,” and whose campaign contributions and lobbying
pushed NAFTA and PNTR with China through Congress.

But Trump has a special remedy picked out for these great-wealth
malefactors, too. He is proposing to give them tax cuts in excess of
$4 trillion.

That’ll show ’em.

Trump argues there’s a synergy between his tariffs and his tax cuts:
The former will bring revenues to the government that will pay for the
latter. There is, in fact, a synergy between them, but that isn’t
it. The synergy is that most of the tariffs—particularly those on
obscure, small developing nations, or, as Trump once termed them,
“shithole” nations—create a target for American anger that
thereby holds Trump’s fellow billionaires harmless. That’s the
synergy at the heart of Trumponomics.

_HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of The American Prospect._

_THE AMERICAN PROSPECT is devoted to promoting informed discussion on
public policy from a progressive perspective. In print and online,
the Prospect brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex
issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary
to create good legislation. We help to dispel myths, challenge
conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue._

_Founded by Robert Kuttner, Paul Starr, and Robert Reich, read the
original 1989 prospectus for the magazine.
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_To learn more about our history, check out this 2015 piece by Starr
and Kuttner
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reflecting on 25 years of politics and change._

_American Prospect, Inc., is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation
headquartered in Washington, D.C._

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