By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, March
12, 2025
There’s a classic episode of The Simpsons in which Homer gets a gun. He thinks his
awesome gun is great for everything, home defense, opening beer bottles,
whatever. When Marge says she doesn’t want a weapon in the house, Homer replies.
“A gun is not a weapon, Marge, it’s a tool. Like a butcher knife or a harpoon,
or … or an alligator. You just need more education on the subject.”
How Homer thinks about guns is not all that dissimilar to
how Donald Trump thinks about tariffs. Or if you want an even more dated pop
culture reference, the Trump administration talks about tariffs the way Chevy
Chase did in the old Saturday Night Live parody commercial for “New Shimmer”: It’s a floor wax and a dessert
topping.
On one hand, the president believes that tariffs make us
rich. “Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,’’ he said on the campaign
trail. Last week in his address to Congress he said, “Tariffs are about making
America rich again.” Indeed, fondness for tariffs as an economic cure-all are
one of the very few policy positions he’s been consistent on for decades. Even back when he was a pro-abortion rights and
anti-gun rights Democrat, he was adamant that tariffs were essential. In his
telling, they protect American jobs and create new ones—at no cost to American
consumers. And while it is true that consumers don’t necessarily absorb 100
percent of the cost of tariffs in every instance, the overwhelming majority of
economists agree that consumers get stuck with the bulk of the inevitable
price spikes.
So one might
wonder why Trump would wait at all to impose tariffs. Just do it and make us
rich again. But he’s not doing it because, as he concedes, tariffs can also
cause a “little
disturbance” for American businesses. Some car parts cross the Mexican or
Canadian border up to eight times before the final product, an “American” car, is completed.
Under pressure from the auto industry, Trump agreed to delay auto tariffs for
30 days, as if whole plants that would make those parts strictly within U.S.
borders could be moved here or built in 30 days.
The administration also insists that tariffs are a useful
tool for other stuff—strengthening the border, say, or stopping the flow of fentanyl into America. (Never mind that the amount of fentanyl coming
into the United States from Canada is close to zero, statistically speaking.)
“This is not a trade war. This is a drug war,” says Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. White House economic and
trade advisers Peter Navarro and Kevin Hassett sing from the same hymnal. But if tariffs make us richer and cost us nothing, why
are the administration’s economic advisers so eager to defend tariffs on
non-economic grounds? Does success in the “drug war” mean self-inflicted
impoverishment in the “trade war?”
“Drug war” is the floor wax, “trade war” is the dessert
topping.
Then there’s the push for “reciprocal tariffs,” which
will allegedly go into effect on April 2. The stated justification is that they
will force other nations to lower their tariffs. And in response, we will lower
ours. The idea seems to be that American businesses will positively respond to
the incentives of high tariffs and bring manufacturing home, and foreign
businesses will respond to tariffs and lower trade barriers, which will cause
us to get rid of tariffs, too. Except the Trump administration doesn’t want to
lower tariffs, it wants more and bigger tariffs: because they’ll make us rich,
save “America’s
soul,” “make
our country a fortune” and thereby free us to eliminate
the income tax and balance the budget.
Tariffs are a tool, you see, like a butcher’s knife,
harpoon and alligator all rolled into one glorious Swiss U.S. army
knife.
I think Trump sincerely believes that tariffs are great
economic tools. But I think he likes tariffs for another reason: They generate
chaos that allows him to “save” individual businesses from the very chaos he
creates. They keep him at the center of not just politics but economics, too.
They incentivize business to make placating, pleasing or rewarding Trump
crucial to their bottom lines.
This sort of incentive for corruption—both in the literal
sense but also in terms of policymaking—is one of the main
reasons we have an income tax in the first place. So
many industries sought special treatment for themselves or vigorous enforcement
for their competition when tariffs funded the government that
Congress—traditionally the designer of trade policy—became a hive of
corruption. The IRS was, in part, an antifraud invention.
Now that trade policy is run out of the Oval Office, such
corruption will be a feature, not a bug.
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