Hello Tariffs, My Friend—Trump’s Trade
Weapon Delivers Early Results

Trump will win this hands down. America has two assets no other country can even come close on. One is the domestic substitution index. Highest in the world. The other is the weight & value of America’s business. Once lost, gone for ever. There is no one else. It is amazing that for decades no one on power in DC realized this.

Though I still acknowledge that he knew more about economics at age 25 (and he's 94 now) than I'll ever know, I'm disappointed in my economics mentor, Dr.Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, who is sounding the alarm that what Trump is doing is a return to the 1930s trade protectionism and may well put us into another depression. Though it could escalate there, it is no such thing right now. A key consideration that Dr. Sowell has overlooked is that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Acts, passed by Congress in 1930 and signed into law by President Hoover, caused a nation that already had huge trade surpluses with the rest of the world (that would be the USA, circa 1930) to put up a wall of import tariffs explicitly intended to close off access to the American market to foreign competition. In response, most of the rest of the world (which already had trade deficits with the US) put up their own tariffs to American exports. America suffered because we were the exporting workshop of the world at the time. In contrast, today the USA is running the trade deficit, and the history of a hundred years ago also informs us that the country who had the trade surpluses suffers the most from a trade war. As evidence, we can look at the economy of the UK, which did not suffer from a depression at all in the 1930s; at worst it had a mild recession. Furthermore, what President Trump has done amounts to imposing a tariff of only half the magnitude of the existing tariffs on the worst offenders, and if properly handled, should get their attention that reductions in their tariff schedules are in order. (And if they do that, we will both arrive at zero tariffs.) But it won't personally bother me if China over-reacts and we end up curtailing (or altogether ending) trade with that country, as we shouldn't trade with a country devoted to a vision where the CCP takes control of global politics and economics, which would be to the advantage of only the 1 million Chinese who are devout CCP members, leaving most of the rest of that country (and the rest of the world) in the peasant state that has persisted despite the revolution of Mao.

Surprising only the outdated, braindead "expert economists" who just cannot wrap their small brains around this new reality. Tariffs have been a weapon against the USA for many decades, now they are a tool to UNDO these unfair trading practices.

To accept any president's authority to lay and collect general tariffs and duties, one would have to ignore the plain language of our Constitution's Article 1, Sec 8, which expressly vests Congress with the “Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, … but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” A Duty is an indirect tax applied to individuals or businesses by a government on goods imported from or exported to a different country and on some goods produced domestically. A tariff, a synonym of an Impost, is a direct tax applied by a government on goods and services imported from or exported to a different country. With tariffs, there are the "seen" winners (e.g., steel manufacturers and their employees) and the inevitable "unseen" losers (e.g., users and manufacturers of steel products and their many employees and customers), who typically vastly outnumber the winners. There were good reasons, after lengthy debate, why the Framers and ratifiers of our Constitution placed the taxing power within Article 1 (Legislative Branch) authorities and not Article II (Executive Branch). Conversely, while the Framers gave Congress the authority to declare war, It vested the Commander-in-Chief authority expressly to the president, and certainly not to the Supreme Court and its subordinate courts created by Congress. When Congress first proposed the federal income tax, it was initially ruled unconstitutional, which prompted Congress and the States to propose and ratify the 16th Amendment in 1913, thus expressly making federal income tax constitutionally compliant. While Congress, through legislation, delegated some specific powers to the Executive relative to laying and collecting tariffs, no constitutional amendment to that effect was ever proposed. The Supreme Court ruled in 1928, as the country was sliding in to the Great Depression, that congressional delegation of legislative authority to the Executive is an implied power of Congress that is constitutional so long as Congress provides an "intelligible principle" to guide the executive branch: "In determining what Congress may do in seeking assistance from another branch, the extent and character of that assistance must be fixed according to common sense and the inherent necessities of the government co-ordination. So long as Congress 'shall lay down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [exercise the delegated authority] is directed to conform, such legislative action is not a forbidden delegation of legislative power." Prior to that ruling, the non delegation doctrine was the general rule regarding the delegation of constitutional powers expressly vested in Congress. That is why the Trump administration initially framed its proposed tariff policy around the national security risk mitigation strategy involving the illegal importation of Fentanyl and/or its precursors from our closest neighboring countries and trading partners. The general tariff regime announced by the administration appears completely disconnected from the "intelligible principle" standard required for the delegation of the tariff authority vested exclusively in Congress by our Constitution. Imagine the uproar if Obama, Biden, (or some future "progressive" president) unilaterally decided to lay 100% tariffs on all imported vehicles with internal combustion engines, while waiving all tariffs, specifically for Chinese manufactured and imported EVs.