During his first term, Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp.” That didn’t happen. Now he may actually do the opposite. If Mr. Trump succeeds in imposing across-the-board tariffs, the swamp will grow.
Mr. Trump borrowed the drain-the-swamp mantra from Ronald Reagan, who invoked it in the 1980s to describe his efforts to shrink government bureaucracy. But Mr. Trump gave the mission new urgency and broader application, pledging to counter bureaucrats and Washington elites—corrupt lobbyists and other big-moneyed interests that make government work for the privileged to the detriment of average Americans. That message still resonates with millions of voters.
The problem is that Mr. Trump’s tariff program would energize and empower these elites. By directing government to impose levies on allies and adversaries alike, he’d be giving more strength to the swamp monsters he’s supposed to be defeating.
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Don’t blame the businesses. They’re understandably trying to avoid paying higher taxes, most of which would be passed on as higher prices to their customers.
We saw this play out in response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs during his first term. When he imposed strict steel and aluminum tariffs in 2018, thousands of U.S. companies lobbied the Commerce Department to end the tariffs or exempt their operations. Some companies exempted from the tariffs lobbied the Commerce Department to keep them in place on their competitors.
As his tariff regime expanded, the number of companies deploying lobbyists in Washington tripled. According to the Journal, there were roughly 100 groups lobbying on tariff issues when Mr. Trump took office. By June 2018, there were nearly 450. Imagine how many more there will be if his second-term tariff program is as expansive as he’s promising.
Also from Vero is this call for privatization.
The economics major is in dire straits. Across the nation, econ curricula aren’t instilling an appreciation for, or even a familiarity with, the economic way of thinking. Theory classes limit the power of economic analysis by reducing markets to sterile exercises in “perfect competition,” or else subordinating social science to social control by obsessing over “market failures.” Empirical classes equip students with sophisticated statistical tools but at the cost of reducing applied economics to data-mongering.
The unfortunate result is that econ majors are almost always half-educated and quarter-lettered. They can memorize models and run regressions. They will confidently make pronouncements about the necessity of corrective taxes and regulations to promote economic efficiency. But they’re unable to explain why popcorn costs so much at the movies, how we know high oil prices aren’t the result of price-gouging, or—most worrying of all—what makes some countries rich and others poor. The situation is grim.
