Source: Washington Post
by Eric Boehm
“At the height of a brief trade war with Europe in the 1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson imposed a 25 percent tariff on imported passenger trucks and vans. It was a retaliatory measure aimed at punishing European countries — France and West Germany, mostly — for tariffs they had slapped on American chicken. That trade war ended long ago, but that 25 percent tariff on pickup trucks and cargo vans remains to this day. … Tariffs are not only costly and distortionary. They also tend to be quite sticky. Economists offer a variety of overlapping explanations for why tariffs, once imposed, have a propensity to outlive the political circumstances that brought them about. Often, that happens because domestic constituencies that benefit from tariffs will fight to keep them around.” (08/12/25)