As of today, tariff rates are at levels not seen in a century, which will result in hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes paid mainly by American companies and consumers.
Effective tariff rates today are about eight times what they were when Trump took office. Retailers cannot avoid passing tariffs of that magnitude down to consumers.
Prices are rising; durable goods have risen by 1.7% this year, the fastest increase in four decades outside of the pandemic. Estimates are that households will lose more than $2,000 each year from tariff-induced price increases, paying nearly 40% more for apparel and 20% more for electronics.
If Trump does not materially lower tariff rates, the U.S. will experience higher unemployment, lower real incomes, slower economic growth, a less competitive manufacturing sector, fewer manufacturing workers and higher prices for imported goods.
Unfortunately, we have an economically illiterate president. He has been told numerous times by economists of all political persuasions that tariffs are like a sales tax and will ultimately be paid by American consumers.
He believes trade deficits are “losing” money to other countries. Losing money is when a hundred dollar bill falls out of your wallet. When you spend $1,000 on a new computer from China, you haven’t lost it; you have bought a new computer.
Moreover, he believes interest rates are too high. If he is to be believed that our economy is the strongest on the world, he is citing one of the reasons for higher, not lower, interest rates. Robust economies need stable or higher interest rates to restrain inflation.
He also has difficulty understanding supply and demand. He wants lower oil prices but promotes “drill, baby, drill.” Lower prices discourage drilling and the number of rigs in operation has been falling.
The economic damage is mounting. The slower growth rate, rising inflation, substantially lower new-hire numbers and higher unemployment rate data released this past week confirm our concerns. Real gross domestic product increased just over 1% in the first half of this year, down from almost 3% last year.
By the way, last week the employment data was revised, as often happens, for two prior months, and also showed very low new hires for last month. Trump reacted by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Talk about shooting the messenger!
Our problems are not confined to the economy. We have a Supreme Court issuing decisions from a shadow docket with little or no explanation. We also have a totally ineffective Congress, and a nation hobbled by drastic cuts to both the expenditures and civil servants who implement programs that give life meaning — health care, clean air and water, protection from food contamination and infectious diseases, safety from roving masked bandits, to name only a few. We have a president who takes actions that ignore the Constitutionally defined roles of the judiciary and Congress and arrogates their powers to himself.
We should have known better in 2024, given this administration’s track record during his first term.
The mid-term elections in 2026 offer the earliest opportunity to at least take some countermeasures against our past mistakes. I urge all to vote in 2026 and not only let their desire to continue as a democracy be known but put a stop to the self-defeating economic policies of this administration.
Andrew T. Morehead is a Greeley resident and a former Foreign Service officer who studied graduate economics at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton under W. Arthur Lewis, a Nobel-prize winning economist.
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