For those who roam within credentialed economic circles and discuss markets with hedge fund managers at the Harvard Club, tariffs are sacrilegious. Speak kindly of them and you're a free market heretic. It's practically un-American.
Sadly for them, tariffs that began in 2018 have not destroyed the U.S. economy. The stock market did not crash. Tariffs weren't the cause of inflation either. And many manufacturing industries from kitchen cabinets in Alabama to solar in Ohio are thriving because of them. Others, like automobiles, may soon need them.
The most famous spokesman for tariffs is Robert Lighthizer, ex-U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) under Donald "Tariff Man" Trump. They made tariffs a household word in 2018 when they imposed Section 301 tariffs on around $250 billion worth of China imports. Lighthizer praised tariffs in The Economist—which is like going to Vatican City and yelling through a bull horn that Jesus is fake. Nowadays, whenever Lighthizer writes in defense of tariffs in the Wall Street Journal, he is met with staunch rebuttal. Then he rebuts the rebuttal in a letter to the editor, then the editorial board rebuts his letter in an op-ed.
We get it. One-worlders hate tariffs, even though we have the lowest WTO tariff rate out of every country at just 3.4 percent. It's lower than business friendly Singapore, lower than the European Union, and lower than the United Kingdom, according to the World Bank's World Tariff Profiles 2023.
Yet the Biden........