How Tariffs Can Help America

Smoot-Hawley was a failure at its time, but its failure tells analysts very little about the effect that tariffs would have on the United States today. That is because now, unlike then, the United States is not producing far more than it can consume. Ironically, the history of Smoot-Hawley says a lot more about how tariffs today would affect a coun

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These tariffs would still come with domestic risks. But for economists to suggest that the effect of tariffs in 1930 must be the same as today only shows how muddled most economists are about trade. The real lesson of Smoot-Hawley is not that the United States cannot benefit from tariffs, but rather that persistent surplus economies should not impl

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This consumer-to-producer shift means tariffs have repercussions for a country’s gross domestic product, or the value of the goods and services produced by its businesses and workers. Because everything an economy produces is either consumed or saved, any policy that raises production relative to consumption automatically forces up the domestic sav

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In the case of Smoot-Hawley, it was clearly the second. At the time those tariffs were enacted, the United States suffered from too much saving and too little consumption. It is why the country exported so much to the rest of the world, like China does today. What Americans needed then (as Eccles understood) was to boost the share of production dis

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Overall, the modern American economy is very different from the one of 1930. In fact, when it comes to trade, the two are almost opposites. The United States now has by far the largest trade deficit in history. That means Americans invest and (mainly) consume far more than they produce. U.S. consumption in the 1920s, in other words, was too low rel

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Like most industrial and trade policies, tariffs operate by transferring income from one part of the economy to another, in this case from net importers to net exporters. They do this by raising the price of imported goods, which benefits the domestic producers of those goods. Because household consumers are net importers, tariffs are effectively a

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Economists weren’t always so mixed up. In his classic 1944 book, International Currency Experience , Ragnar Nurkse wrote that “the devaluation of a currency is expansionary in effect if it corrects a previous overvaluation, but deflationary if it makes the currency undervalued.” Tariffs, which are close cousins of currency devaluation, act in the s

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But there are two very different ways by which tariffs can lower consumption as a share of GDP. One way is by increasing GDP as a whole. This happens when a tariff’s implicit subsidy to production results in more jobs and higher wages, which in turn leads to an overall increase in total consumption. The higher savings—or the gap between the increas

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The other way, however, involves decreasing consumption as a share of GDP by suppressing consumption itself—not by fostering overall economic growth. This occurs when tariffs raise the price of imported products without raising wages, making it harder for people to purchase goods. Such tariffs do not produce a rise in production because domestic pr

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