Trump's Malignant Mercantilism
The president’s double-talk about tariffs reflects his economically ignorant conviction that exports are good and imports are bad.
The president’s double-talk about tariffs reflects his economically ignorant conviction that exports are good and imports are bad.
While Trump prepares another round of aid payments for farmers, Marco Rubio is pushing for tariffs on Mexican fruits and vegetables that will send prices soaring.
The most likely end result of Trump's literal Buy American policy: lots of American farm goods rotting in federal warehouses
Marx “was a champion of free trade, and no friend of tariff barriers.”
If the United States had pursued a different strategy from the outset of the Trump administration, it might now be in a position to counter China's hardball tactics.
America first? It really depends on what part of America you live in.
Is Trump using tariffs as a negotiating tactic? That's the most generous reading of his trade policy, but it's unsupported by the facts.
Private property rights, public squares, "dangerous" speech, and pre-regulatory suck-ups, all debated on the Reason Podcast.
Is the president the only person left in America who doesn't understand that Americans are paying for his tariffs?
The federal law protecting the shipping industry from competition strikes again.
Once a protectionist, always a protectionist.
A key senator issues the sort of binary, transactional choice that Trump seems to prefer. Will the POTUS listen?
After overpromising the benefits and underestimating the costs, reality is starting to puncture the White House's messaging on trade.
A new report finds the tariffs raised $82 million for the U.S. Treasury but ended up increasing costs for consumers by about $1.2 billion.
And they'll cost more to buy
But wasn't the whole point of the trade war to boost U.S. manufacturing?
Protectionist policies produce negative results.
Donald Trump's rhetoric is breathtakingly authoritarian, but so far he's done less than his predecessors to expand executive power.
The splintering of international economic interdependence is a worrying sign for peace through trade.
Oh, and the U.S. auto industry wouldn't even last that long.
Closing the border would be a "profit-making operation," says Trump. That's not how any of this works.
That should be enough to end this silly debate. But what the president says and what the president does are not always the same.
Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's revisionist history of the U.S.-China trade relationship misses the mark.
He's a free trader against dumping, a deficit hawk for Medicare expansion, and an anti-drug warrior who wants to imprison pharma execs.
"Bilateral tariffs result in lower GDP, employment, investment, and trade for the U.S.," a new report concludes.
Fretting over deficits and intellectual property will do no good and much harm.
That's just fine, unless you happen to be a president who promised to reduce it.
New study shows U.S. consumers pay every dollar of the tariffs, which have also damaged supply chains and the availability of goods.
Any deal will be better than the current mess, which is largely of Trump's own making.
Trump could destroy American jobs and America's relationship with Germany at the same time.
Steel manufacturers spent $12.2 million lobbying the federal government in 2018, an increase of nearly 20 percent over the previous year.
There are dueling bills in front of Congress, both backed by Republicans. One would expand Trump's tariff authority, while the other would check it.
A bipartisan, bicameral proposal would stop Trump from using the tired "national security" excuse to justify his protectionist trade policies.
Because of tariffs, Ford hourly employees will lose out on $750 they would have otherwise received.
Dow Jones skyrockets on news that Steve Mnuchin is leading behind-the-scenes effort to reduce tariffs on China.
And it's not a record low. That's fine, but it's not what the president said would happen.
What to expect at LibertyCon, the annual meeting of the largest libertarian student group on the planet (plus how to get 40 percent off registration).
Attempts to control how artificial intelligence develops and is used could backfire.
Catoctin Creek Distillery's tariff woes show that no one wins a trade war.
When Europe's beer-brewing, liquor-distilling monks combine Catholicism and capitalism, the results are delicious.
Regardless of the president's Twitter bravado, this year has provided a painful lesson in how tariffs grow government and hurt the economy.
Reason editors' best and worst moments of 2018, including the president's welcome and long-overdue drawdown from Afghanistan
The Trump administration's response to a lawsuit challenging steel tariffs is a deeply un-conservative argument for greater executive power.
Peter Suderman, Len Gilroy, and C. Boyden Gray diagnose the country's many fiscal woes, and offer some solutions, at Reason's 50th anniversary celebration.
Today, the U.S. Court for International Trade will hear a challenge to the "national security" rationale Trump used to impose those tariffs in June.
A new poll shows Americans (including Republicans) are rejecting Trump's nationalist view of global trade.