Source: Independent Institute
by Allen Gindler
“Imagine two businesses across the street from each other: a hardware store and a café. Once a year, the café buys a set of pans from the hardware store to keep its kitchen running. Meanwhile, every day, the hardware store’s employees pop over to the café for lunch — sandwiches, coffee, maybe a slice of pie. At the end of the year, the hardware store’s manager tallies up the books and frowns. ‘Look at this!’ he says. ‘We’re spending way more on lunches than the café spends on our pans. We’ve got a trade deficit with them! This has to stop.’Sounds familiar? It’s the kind of logic you hear on the news: ‘Country X buys less from us than we buy from them — unfair!’ The solution, we’re told, is tariffs — taxes on imports to ‘level the playing field.'” (04/04/25)
https://blog.independent.org/2025/04/04/tariffs-trade-deficits-lessons-hardware-store-cafe