Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“‘To this day I cannot tell you what Trump truly believes about tariffs,’ Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles recently confessed. ‘Does he want tariffs instrumentally, to increase trade? Does he believe in tariffs as a revenue-raising mechanism? And is he hard-core on tariffs? I couldn’t tell you; the man is inscrutable.’ In ‘Tariffs Are Awful, But The Income Tax May Be Worse,’ economist Walter Block seems less confused. ‘Donald Trump supports them on the ground that the McKinley administration was prosperous, and relied upon tariffs,’ Walter’s Eurasia Review op-ed posits. Our free-market economist notes that this rests on a fallacy: ‘since A precedes B, A must be the cause of B.’ Professor Block offers a better ‘historical episode to shed light on this matter, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930.’ You know, the tariff hike that worsened the Great Depression.” (04/01/25)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2025/04/01/the-trump-tariff-question/