Letter to the Editor

Here’s a Letter to the Editor I sent to the NYT a few weeks ago. Since I haven’t heard back, I assume it’s not coming out.

Editor:

Other countries are trying to figure out how to win a potential “trade war” with Trump. Fortunately, there is an easy and effective way to do so: don’t play his games.

For someone who has proclaimed himself the “tariff man,” he doesn’t seem to understand how tariffs actually work. Theory and evidence both confirm one thing: that tariffs are paid by the domestic country imposing the tariffs, not the foreign country being targeted. Insofar as they raise revenue, they do so off the backs of American consumers, not foreign producers. To the extent that tariffs promote domestic job growth in some sectors, they do so at the cost of significantly greater job losses in other domestic sectors. The steel and aluminum tariffs in 2018 were credited with initially saving about 1,000 jobs in the steel and aluminum producing sectors. They were also the cause of between 170,000 and 300,000 job losses in overall manufacturing, i.e. the steel and aluminum using sectors.

Tariffs are a rotten deal for the American people. But other countries imposing retaliatory tariffs would be a rotten deal for their people, too. The rest of the world, like the US, needs to look at reducing barriers to trade, not erecting new ones. If President Trump wants to build walls, adding more walls on top will only further impoverish their people.