Trump And His Tariffs

By John J. Duncan Jr.
duncanj@knoxfocus.com

In early 2016, I became one of the first members of Congress to endorse Donald Trump for the nomination of the Republican Party as our candidate for president.

I did this because he seemed to be by far the least hawkish of all the Republicans running at that time, and I also agreed with his America First platform.

One of his campaign officials told me he wanted to call and thank me, and the next morning he called and we spoke for about 20 minutes.

He was in a very good mood, and I told him about some of the things we agreed on, especially trade and stopping illegal immigration.

I know that no two people agree on everything, and even husbands and wives and best friends disagree sometimes.

I also have said and written that even Trump’s strongest supporters do not like some of the things he has said or done.

I have been very disappointed – but not the least bit surprised – that he has not criticized Israel or done more to stop the killing of thousands of little children in Gaza.

But I am strongly in favor of his efforts to cut all the waste and fraud in the federal government. I know that we must do this in order to pay our social security and have our money be worth much at all in the very near future.

The Democrat way for far too many years has been to approve any and all spending and then pay for it by printing more money and borrowing more and inflating the heck out of our currency.

Now our national debt is almost $37 trillion, a humanly incomprehensible figure, and it will go much higher very soon if we don’t do the very unpopular things Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency are trying to do.

I have always heard inflation referred to as the cruelest tax of all because, in a way, it is a secret, underhanded kind of tax that hits the poorest hardest of all.

Now Trump is trying to get more fairness in our international trade by imposing some tariffs on countries that impose them on U.S. goods.

In the month of January alone, we had a trade deficit of $131 billion. For the year 2024, it was a record $918.4 billion. This means we have been buying hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods and services from other countries for many years.

This also means that we have sent millions of good jobs to other countries, and is why so many college graduates can only find jobs as waiters and waitresses.

With only four percent of the world’s population, we buy almost 30 percent of the world’s goods and services. This means every country desperately wants to enter our market. We have tremendous leverage on trade that we haven’t used effectively or really hardly at all in the past.

Some multi-national companies that benefit from cheap labor have hired think tanks and professors to put out studies and articles saying tariffs will hurt the U.S. economy.

They have used scare tactics such as blaming the U.S. depression on the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930. Yet the situation was totally different then. We even had a trade surplus at that time, not a $918 billion trade deficit.

The Great Depression started in 1929, yet the Smoot-Hawley Act was not enacted until June of 1930. According to Wikipedia, “The average tariff rate, which was applied on dutiable imports, was 40.1% in 1929, and increased to 59.1% in 1932.”

It was applied across the board to over 20,000 imported items. Trump is not planning on placing tariffs on that many items, and the tariffs are not nearly that high.

Already, some major companies have announced plans to put factories here in the U.S. that they had planned on putting in other countries. Trump is trying to use the threat or temporary imposition of some tariffs as a negotiating tool to get more fairness in our trade system and bring thousands of jobs back to the U.S.

These are good and worthwhile goals that most Americans support. If Congress would cooperate, I believe what Trump is trying to do would make this country stronger, given a little bit of time.

I do not like to see anyone lose a job. However, I knew that there would be tearjerker stories about many people who were losing jobs in our bloated federal bureaucracy, but it really needed to be done.

In the same way, there will be tearjerker stories about people who lose jobs because of Trump’s tariffs.

The one thing you can always count on with the national media is that they will put the worst possible spin on anything a Republican does.

But I think the overwhelming majority know this country can’t keep going the way it has been.