Courts keep knocking down President Trump’s border taxes, but he keeps imposing them, no matter the economic or (soon) the political harm. His tariff fixation is as unmovable as Bernie Sanders’s loathing for the rich.
The U.S. Trade Representative last week teed up new tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on some 60 countries. After the Supreme Court struck down the President’s emergency tariffs in February, the Administration invoked Section 122 to impose a 10% across the board tariff. A federal court last month ruled those tariffs unlawful, and they are also time-limited to 150 days.
So Mr. Trump is dusting off Section 301, which lets him impose tariffs in response to “unfair foreign acts, policies, or practices affecting U.S. commerce.” The first Trump Administration used the law to slap tariffs on China as punishment for its mercantilist policies, including intellectual property theft and forced technology transfers.
But rather than perform detailed investigations for each country, the trade office simply declares that they all engage in unfair trade practices by failing to “impose and effectively enforce a forced labor import prohibition.”
“This creates a dynamic where American workers are forced to compete globally on an unlevel playing field,” says U.S. Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer. Sorry, forced labor isn’t why companies manufacture products outside the U.S. Other countries have comparative advantages, but we know there’s no point informing the President about David Ricardo.
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Mr. Trump’s tariff obsession is a self-defeating act. There’s been no surge in domestic manufacturing, and they are contributing to rising prices. They are also unpopular, especially in the farm belt. That’s presumably why he reduced the Section 232 tariff rate on farm equipment recently to 15% from 25%.
Tariffs are a major reason voters aren’t happy with Mr. Trump and Republicans on the economy and inflation. A recent Fox News poll showed that 71% of voters disapprove of his handling of the economy, including 42% of those who voted for the President and 67% of whites without college degrees. Good luck in November, Republicans.
Either way, Section 301 tariffs are intended to secure the removal of foreign barriers, not to impose long-term tariff increases on Americans. President Trump and former US Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer imposed the biggest Section 301 tariffs in history to encourage China to modify its investment and intellectual property policies during President Trump’s first term. Unfortunately, those tariffs failed to achieve their stated goals. The tariffs were supposed to expire after four years, but the Biden Administration took the unprecedented action of extending them, and the Trump Administration is now considering whether to extend them again.
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According to Greer, “The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labor is unacceptable. This creates a dynamic where American workers are forced to compete globally on an unlevel playing field.”
His statement may appear to be relatively innocuous. In reality, it represents a massive power grab designed to give USTR unlimited control over imports.
If allowed to stand, the new template for future tariffs will be:
- Announce: “The failure of our most important trading partners to ______ is unacceptable. This creates an unlevel playing field.”
- Fill in the blank with anything that can be dreamed up.
- Assert the stated foreign action is unreasonable and burdens US commerce.
Section 301 then gives USTR blanket authority to impose duties, limitations, or even import prohibitions, unless the courts or Congress intervene. Future USTRs, regardless of political party, may inherit essentially unlimited tariff power
A reasonable response would be for Congress to change our trade laws to require a vote on Section 301 tariffs. After all, in 1776, the American colonists declared their independence in part to escape the authority of a King who cut off our trade with all parts of the world.
Another skeptic of Trump’s latest excuse for tariffing Americans is Jim Bacchus. A slice:
But there is scant logic in some of the distinctions the administration has made in doing so. Especially, nothing appears to have been done to set tariffs at different levels for different countries, depending on the seriousness of the alleged human rights violations. Tariffs of 10 percent will be imposed on a group of countries that have supposedly imposed a partial prohibition on imports made by forced labor, while tariffs of 12.5 percent will be applied on a group of countries that have not imposed any legal prohibition at all. But there has seemingly been no attempt to distinguish between these countries based on the extent of their actual imports of products tainted by forced labor.
If justifiable distinctions have been made here based on human rights failures, why is the same tariff of 12.5 percent being applied to imports from China and Switzerland? In addition, why have countries such as Afghanistan, Belarus, and Myanmar—where the United States has identified significant abuses of forced labor—been excluded from these new tariffs? And is it only a coincidence that these new tariffs seem for some reason to add up to sums approaching the previous Trump tariffs that were struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States in its ruling under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and by other federal courts since?
It can, of course, be assumed that the president and his trade team do oppose forced labor. Their record thus far supports that assumption. But all these questions about these new tariffs suggest that they are being applied more as a means of finding a new way to help replace the tariffs that the courts have ruled illegal than as a means of combating the human rights abuses of forced labor.
The important lesson is more philosophical than technical. The shale revolution was not centrally planned into existence. It emerged from decentralized experimentation, private investment, risk-taking, and a government that respects property rights and otherwise gets out of the way. In other words, it emerged from the exact kind of society Simon believed produced human progress.
Few public officials understand that lesson better than Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.
Long before entering government, Wright argued that abundant energy is the foundation of modern human flourishing. Clean cooking, refrigeration, transportation, clean water systems, modern medicine, industrial production, and computing power all depend on enormous amounts of energy.
The optimistic worldview shared by [Julian] Simon and Wright has taken decades to reach the mainstream and influence policymakers. However, today, it looks like the future.
George Will writes wisely. Two slices:
Jonathan Alpert, a therapist uneasy about the professional company he keeps, writes in “Therapy Nation” that between 2011 and 2023, the number seeking mental health treatment “skyrocketed” from 31.6 million to 59.2 million — about 1 in 6 Americans. Alpert believes in therapy, but blames the booming “therapy industry” for a “therapy-obsessed culture” of dependence, self-absorption, self-pity, complaining, blaming, venting and cultivated misery. Proudly fragile as victims of their circumstances, more and more Americans regard every discomfort as a “trauma” (the Greek root of the word is “wound”) to be healed by therapy laced with pharmacology. Resilience wanes and the concept of responsibility blurs.
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The English language has been infused with such categories from one precinct of the therapy profession. It teaches that disagreeable character traits are jumbles of curable “disorders” for which the individual is not responsible. Before this enlightenment, people had to make do with primitive categories. For example, someone with [Graham] Platner’s array of disorders would have been diagnosed as: a jerk.
