2.5 cheers for Trump’s tariff policy

Don’t look at the stock market.
If you do look, don’t go looking for the highest bridge in your town.
Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff fest has thrown the financial universe into a tailspin.
But the world is not ending. America’s economy is not on the road to becoming Kenya. And a new Toyota Corolla won’t cost $60,000 this summer.
Democrats and the liberal media are saying Trump’s new reciprocal tariff policy is going to wreck the economy. I’m sure someone somewhere is already calling it an impeachable offense.
It’s funny. A week ago, few Americans even knew how many “f’s” there are in “tariff.”
Today, thanks to Trump’s crash course on Wednesday, we’re all experts on how tariffs hurt or help the economy, how Canada’s tariffs on our lumber and eggs are sky high and how tariffs affect the snow melt in western Montana.
I don’t pretend to be a tariff expert. But I know most conservative and liberal economists – from Milton Friedman to Maynard Keynes – don’t like them.
They say imposing tariffs on imports looks good politically because they can protect your home country’s industries like steel from foreign competition and keep your factories and plants humming and hiring.
But at the same time, although it’s much harder to see, those same steel tariffs hurt every consumer of steel.
Carmakers and washing machine makers either have to pay higher prices for foreign steel or buy homegrown steel from domestic producers that costs more than it should and might even be inferior.
A tariff is essentially a border tax that is charged on the importation of goods from a foreign country. In a perfect world, they would not exist. Trade among nations would be as free, untaxed and friendly as the trade between Ohio and Pennsylvania.
But politics and nationalism have always trumped free trade. As we’ve learned this week, tariffs are a weapon used by virtually every free and unfree nation of every size to protect its industries, businesses and farmers from foreign competition.
In the 1800s we grew to become an industrial powerhouse behind a border wall of high tariffs built by Republicans that protected our wheat and cotton farmers and infant industries like steel.

But since World War II, tariffs have been a bipartisan power tool for every president.
In 1983 my father imposed a tariff of 45 percent on heavyweight Japanese motorcycles to protect Harley-Davidson’s hogs until the company righted itself.
Trump’s tariffs are nothing like President Hoover’s disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930 that set off a tariff war among nations and worsened and prolonged the Great Depression.
But I have no idea what effect “Liberation Day” will have on either the economy or politics – and neither do you. In the short term, it’s going to be wild and crazy for the stock markets.
In the medium to long term, though, things will stabilize. They always do. Foreign governments will adjust their tariffs and so will we. In theory, reciprocation should work, but it’ll take time.
Since I’m not a billionaire and Trump is, I’m thinking he understands the economy somewhat better than I do.
As we’ve seen, his negotiating style on tariffs is the same rough-and-tumble, I-win-you-lose style he used when he was a crazy New York City real estate mogul.
We know he hates to lose. We know he enjoys calling the shots. We know that he says and does things my father and every president before him would never dream of doing.
But we elected Donald Trump in a convincing way. He’s our guy in charge. We should cheer him on. We should give him the space to put in place the many things he believes will Make America Great Again.
So everybody – and I mean everybody – should pray that he’s right about his tariff policy.
If he is wrong, and “Liberation Day” turns out to be a disaster, he, the Republican Party and the country will pay the price in the midterms.

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.