Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.
Editor:
Rightly decrying Trump’s escalation of what you call his “tariff blitz,” you reveal – but don’t comment on – an internal contradiction in the administration’s excuses for punitively taxing Americans’ purchases of imports (“The Trump Tariffs Keep Coming,” April 24).
To justify these tariffs legally, the president imposes them under Sections 232 and 301, the former to protect U.S. national security and the latter to counter allegedly “unfair” trade practices. Yet Mr. Trump also boasts that his tariffs will raise enormous amounts of revenue. When properly used, however, Sections 232 and 301 keep tariffed imports out of the U.S., resulting in no revenues collected on those excluded imports.
If the purpose of the tariffs really is to enhance U.S. national security and counter “unfair” trade practices, it cannot also be to raise revenue. But if the goal instead is to raise revenue, then imposing these tariffs under Sections 232 and 301 is unlawful.
The administration either doesn’t see this contradiction, or it has such contempt for the intelligence of the American people that it thinks nothing of baldly expressing this contradiction. Either way, we Americans have no reason to trust anything this administration says or does regarding trade.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
