That's via Daniel J. Mitchell's article: The Protectionism Edition of Economics Humor. More at the link, but I warn you that I found only one more of his examples actually amusing. (The one with the dragons.) The rest: true, just not funny.
But elsewhere on the web, there's more serious analysis of the tariffs, for example from the WSJ editorialists: A $6 Trillion Trump Tax Increase?.
Financial markets have the shakes as President Trump prepares to launch his next big tariff salvo on Wednesday. And nerves are appropriate since Mr. Trump’s chief trade adviser, Peter Navarro, is boasting about what he says will amount to a $6 trillion tax increase from the tariffs.
“Tariffs are going to raise about $600 billion a year, about $6 trillion over a 10-year period,” Mr. Navarro told Fox News on Sunday. This is on top of $100 billion a year from Mr. Trump’s car and truck tariffs. He also tried to claim that “the message is that tariffs are tax cuts.”
George Orwell, call your office. In the real economic world, a tariff is a tax. If you raise $600 billion more a year in revenue for the federal government, you are taking that amount away from individuals and businesses in the private economy.
Also commenting on Navarro's Orwellian ramblings is Eric Boehm: Peter Navarro says tariffs will be $6 trillion tax increase but also tax cut.
Navarro's way of squaring that circle is to argue that those tax increases aren't tax increases at all—because the tariff revenue will be used to offset the budgetary cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts.
It is impossible to know whether that math works out because the White House has released few details about the tariffs that Trump has repeatedly promised to impose on April 2. Navarro provided no details in his Sunday interview with Fox News to explain how he arrived at the $6 trillion figure.
(Indeed, the lack of information regarding this week's tariff announcement is becoming its own story. In a separate interview also on Fox News, Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, said he "can't give…any forward-looking guidance on what's going to happen this week.")
"Forward-looking guidance?" Hassett is to be complimented on finding a new way to say, "We have no idea what's going to happen because of this."
Jeff Maurer is suitably wondering: Where’s This Shadowy Cabal of Business Elites I Keep Hearing About?.
Tomorrow, Trump will implement a major new round of tariffs. He’s calling it “Liberation Day”, probably because he’s going to liberate your 401K from having any value. The plan is largely the brainchild of Trump — who really puts the “child” in “brainchild” — and Peter Navarro, who is to economics what Captain Crunch is to naval strategy. The tariffs will lead to higher prices, which is ironic because some people voted for Trump because they thought he would lower prices, and economists told them that he wouldn’t but they voted for him anyway, and that’s why I recently moved all of my money into schadenfreude futures.
Basically nobody in business or economics wants this. The stock market has been tanking as people slowly wake up to the horror that Trump might actually not be bullshitting for the first time in his life. I find it stunning that this might happen — it’s such an unforced error. And I’m wondering: Where the fuck is this shadowy cabal of business elites that I’m always hearing about? You know: The behind-the-scenes puppet masters who secretly run the economy and the world? The far left and far right both constantly tell me that they run the world, so…where the fuck are they right now? Shouldn’t they be protecting their business interests so that they can go back to cackling maniacally while they light a cigar with a $100 bill?
I am unabashedly Team Evil Cabal right now. They are exactly the bloodthirsty profit-mongers we need to step in and restore sanity. I’m told that they only care about the profit and are positively ruthless in pursuit of their interests. And I think that sounds lovely — let’s do that, how do I vote for these people? Do they even need my vote — haven’t they been pulling the levers of our Shamocracy this whole time? But if that’s true, then why don’t they pull the “don’t tank the economy for no reason” lever? I hate to be a back-seat rapacious profiteer, but that’s what I’d do if I was stealthily manipulating the global economy from a secret lair beneath the Denver airport.
Yeah, I've been there. It's mostly nice, but the smell of whiskey and cigars is overpowering.
That's the Denver airport, though. At the White House, it's just the Underpants Gnomes.
Roger Pielke Jr. has a very good summary article on Economics and Politics of Tariffs. As befits an ex-prof:
If we were back in my classroom I’d share the following discussion questions along with the readings, to focus the students on policy thinking and to kick off our discussion:
Tariffs are policy. What problem(s) are they justified as addressing?
By what metrics would you suggest that we evaluate the effectiveness of trade policy with respect to their justifications? With what data? Collected by whom?
How long until we would know the effectiveness of changes to trade policy with respect to addressing the problem(s) that justified them in the first place?
Similarly, how would we know if tariffs are not working as justified?
How do we make sense of tariffs as policy (a course of action) versus tariffs as politics (bargaining, negotiation, and compromise)?
These question seek to push students beyond the promotion of policy alternatives and toward thinking about implementation and evaluation.
Those are very non-Gnomish questions. I've (sometimes) advocated that proposed policy changes, regulations, or laws be accompanied by "suicide clauses":
"Here are the benefits this new policy (regulation, law) will provide:" Followed by a list of objective measures, for example the DJIA, unemployment rate, inflation, pollution levels, etc.
"And if these things don't come to pass, this policy (regulation, law) will immediately be repealed."
If you're unwilling to bet on the outcome of your policy, why should anyone take you seriously?
Also of note:
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Credit where due. Jonathan Turley notes a probably unintentional result of a recent appearance by Katherine Maher before a Congressional committee: NPR’s CEO Just Made the Best Case Yet for Defunding NPR. Since we have kind of an Orwellian theme today, it's notable that Maher tried to memory-hole her past positions:
When asked about her past public statements that Trump is a “deranged, racist sociopath,” she said that she would not post such views today. She similarly brushed off her statements that America is “addicted to White supremacy” and her view that the use of the words “boy and girl” constitute “erasing language” for non-binary people.
When asked about her past assertion that the U.S. was founded on “black plunder and white democracy,” Maher said she no longer believed what she had said.
When asked about her support for the book “The Case for Reparations,” Maher denied any memory of ever having read the book. She was then read back her own public statements about how she took a day to read the book in a virtue-signaling post.
She then denied calling for reparations, but was read back her own declaration: “Yes, the North, yes all of us, yes America. Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt. Yes, reparations. Yes, on this day.” She then bizarrely claimed she had not meant giving Black people actual money, or “fiscal reparations.”
And more. Big Sister is watching you!
![[The Blogger and His Dog]](/ps/images/me_with_barney.jpg)
