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Even Those Who Believe Tariffs Are Useful Think Trump's Trade War Makes 'Zero Sense'
One economist warned the tariffs would amount to the "largest tax increase... that has ever been imposed" on working-class families.
Feb 03, 2025
The trade war that U.S. President Donald Trump launched over the weekend by announcing sweeping new tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China drew intense criticism from experts and analysts across the ideological spectrum, including those who believe strategically deployed tariffs can help protect domestic jobs and workers.
"Tariffs are a powerful, effective tool to deliver certain goals. But Trump's Canada/China/Mexico tariffs make zero sense. And even undermine tariffs' legit uses," Lori Wallach, director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project, wrote on social media late Sunday, expressing agreement with United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain.
Fain said in a
statement that the UAW "supports aggressive tariff action to protect American manufacturing jobs as a good first step to undoing decades of anti-worker trade policy," pointing specifically to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its successor agreement that Trump negotiated during his first White House term.
The union does not, however, "support using factory workers as pawns in a fight over immigration or drug policy," Fain continued. "The national emergency we face is not about drugs or immigration, but about a working class that has fallen behind for generations while corporate America exploits workers abroad and consumers at home for massive Wall Street paydays."
The officially stated purpose for Trump's 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports and 10% tariffs on Chinese imports is to confront what the White House described as the "extraordinary threat" posed by the movement of migrants and drugs across the southern and northern U.S. borders.
But Wallach argued Sunday that using tariffs to address immigration and the flow of drugs "is like trying surgery using a saxophone—wrong tool!"
"After decades of an American trade policy run by and for the largest corporations and to the detriment of American workers, independent farmers, and small businesses, we certainly do need a new approach," she added. "But simply imposing 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada and another 10% on China will not rebuild American manufacturing/create U.S. manufacturing jobs or raise wages. Particularly, if such tariffs can be axed, lowered, or upped at the president's whim for reasons unrelated to trade/jobs."
"While tariffs can play a constructive role in protecting U.S. jobs and enforcing labor and environmental standards when part of a strategic industrial policy, Trump's approach is neither strategic nor appropriate."
Trump told reporters late last week that he is "not looking for a concession" in response to the new tariffs, which prompted swift retaliation from Canada, Mexico, and China.
The announced tariffs, which are set to take effect on Tuesday, also shook U.S. and global equity markets as Trump threatened additional duties against imports from European Union nations and admitted Americans could experience "some pain" stemming from the trade war. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Monday that her country reached an agreement with Trump to delay implementation of the tariffs on Mexican imports for a month, reportedly in exchange for the deployment of 10,000 Mexican soldiers to the country's northern border.
Contrary to Trump's insistence that tariffs are paid by targeted nations, they are in fact paid by U.S. importers, who then either eat the costs or pass them on to consumers through higher prices. Economist Dean Baker noted that the new tariffs amount to "a tax increase of roughly $200 billion a year ($1,600 per family) that will overwhelmingly be paid by moderate-income and middle-income families."
"It is the largest tax increase on them that has ever been imposed," Baker wrote Sunday. "And retaliation from both countries is likely to impose additional costs."
Melinda St. Louis, Global Trade Watch director at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in a statement that "no matter the intractable problem, Trump's go-to playbook is to bully our neighbors through tariffs and to scapegoat immigrants."
"Instead of addressing the actual causes or seeking real solutions to the complex public health crisis surrounding fentanyl, Trump jumps to impose damaging and self-defeating across-the-board tariffs and to spout more hateful rhetoric that dehumanizes our immigrant neighbors," said St. Louis. "While tariffs can play a constructive role in protecting U.S. jobs and enforcing labor and environmental standards when part of a strategic industrial policy, Trump's approach is neither strategic nor appropriate."
"Using tariffs to bully countries to advance an anti-immigrant and anti-humanitarian agenda will do nothing to support U.S. workers and will make our immigrant neighbors less safe," she added.
The tariffs also drew backlash from the right-wing Wall Street Journaleditorial board, which slammed the president for launching "the dumbest trade war in history."
"Bad policy has damaging consequences," the editorial board wrote late Sunday, "whether or not Mr. Trump chooses to admit it."
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How Corporate America Subverts Reform to Boost Profits
Corporations use their endless resources to ensure that efforts designed to benefit people enrich those at the very top.
Apr 01, 2023
One measure of corporate power’s dominance is its 24/7 relentless, profit-driven capacity to strike back and prevail over reforms or other efforts designed to give the people voice and fairness.
Here are some examples that should give us pause in touting civic victories:
A few years ago, during lunch with the formidable, creative Brian Lamb—founder of C-SPAN—I asked whether, after decades of blanket coverage of Congressional sessions, accessible to millions of people, Congress was an improved institution. After all, as Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote: “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” His reply: “No.” Such is the ever-growing grip of corporate lobbyists directly on and inside Congress, compared to the unorganized sovereign people back home.
The massive government investment in developing important pharmaceuticals over the decades, followed by free giveaways of these discoveries to drug companies, was supposed to reduce the corporate cost of discovering and testing new medicines and thereby reduce what companies like Pfizer, Merck and Eli Lilly would charge patients. No way—Americans, who paid for these discoveries, are charged record-high prices for pharmaceuticals—higher than in any other country in the world.
To add insult to injury, American drug firms exported production of many of these medicines to China and India for importing back to the U.S. for a greater profit than might come from U.S. production. One result—the national security nightmare of our country not producing any antibiotics here at home!
During the second Bush Administration, Congress cut the tax rate sharply to induce U.S. companies to bring home tens of billions of stored dollars in return for businesses promising to invest this money in productive enterprise and wage gains. Result—a double-cross. Instead, the companies bought back their own stock, pumped up executive compensation, and funded mergers.
Years ago, Congress passed legislation allowing business corporations to deduct up to ten percent of their taxable income for charitable contributions. The lawmakers thought this would unleash large sums of money to help the needy in addition to educational and civic initiatives.
Result: Only a tiny number of major corporations exceed the one percent level of charitable donations. Hugely profitable companies give to charitable activities at a fraction of one percent. Apple is one of them, headed by CEO Tim Cook who makes $833 A MINUTE!
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) does not require companies to disclose their percentage of charitable contributions. Institutional and individual shareholders should introduce resolutions to compel the top brass to do so. Such resolutions should win a majority of votes and open the door to the shame and embarrassment of stingy companies. In such a “soft area,” this may be enough to spring tens of billions of dollars for “good works.” Wake up perpetrators of “good works!” All you have to lose is your perennial red ink.
President Bill Clinton produced another unintended boomerang when in 1993, he got through Congress a revenue rule prohibiting deductibility for any corporate boss who received annual compensation above $1 million a year. However, the rule came with a giant “loophole.” As Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies wrote in a report you should read: “So-called ‘performance’ pay, including stock options and certain bonuses, would be exempted from the deductibility cap.”
Result: Executive compensation via deviously calculated stock options and bonuses skyrocketed, and, combined with a Reaganite elimination of SEC restrictions over stock buybacks in 1982, led to the gigantic waste of trillions of dollars of corporate profits poured (shareholder money) into unproductive stock buybacks.
Corporate bosses have a personal interest in stock buybacks. As Steve Clifford showed in his book The CEO Pay Machine: How It Trashes America and How to Stop It, the bosses developed metrics for raising their pay that just happened to coincide with the stock buyback and stock option racket.
The emergence of the Pentagon-developed Internet was supposed to even a playing field between the haves and the have-nots by making access, retrieval, and transfer of knowledge and informed advocacy virtually free. It was supposed to give power to the people.
Result: Addictive trivia to the masses, information overload, and the rise of the Wardens of the Internet Gulag – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and the rest of these unregulated control freaks who distribute your personal information anywhere in the world for big profits.
Then, of course, there is the old standby—Regulatory Capture. First comes reforms for the people after years of striving to create health, safety, and economic regulatory agencies to impose some ‘law and order’ on the out-of-control corporate bandits and greed hounds. Then come the rebounds. Corporate lobbyists, campaign cashiers, and the placement of corporatists to run federal agencies. These corporate operatives work to put the agencies to sleep or to actually turn them against the people directly through this internal sabotage. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) are two such examples.
Congress has even let the drug and medical device companies fund the FDA’s drug approval regulatory apparatus. What’s that saying about ‘not biting the hand that feeds you’?
Knowing about this second, third, and fourth strike capability by big business may sensitize citizen groups and advocates to demand that the Democratic Party, at least, be alert and forceful in rolling back these anti-people travesties when they achieve majority status on Capitol Hill. Rhetoric is useless.
To date, the Dems have rarely done so even for such giveaways as Trump’s 2017 huge tax cut for the rich and powerful, which the Democrats had opposed. Taking over the House in 2019, some Dems led by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman, Richard Neal (D-MA) openly said they were not going to move to repeal and use the monies for good purposes.
Persistent Democracy does take work, doesn’t it? Oh people!
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If Bloomberg Wants to Buy an Election, He Should Run as a Republican Against Trump--Not Sabotage Democrats
The mega-billionaire should be running against Trump in the Republican primaries, not as a Democrat. If he actually cared about this country more than stroking his massive ego that is exactly what he would be doing.
Feb 10, 2020
Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is one of the 10 richest persons in the world, with a net worth approaching $60 billion, depending upon the vagaries of the stock and bond markets on any given day.
For anyone who is not a billionaire, it is almost impossible to grasp just how much money this is for a single human being. It would be like calculating the distance of our planet to a distant galaxy in centimeters. Bloomberg could spend $100 million every single day on his presidential campaign between now and election day in November--basically more than any candidate except Bloomberg and fellow billionaire Tom Steyer have spent so far in the entire 2019-20 election cycle--and he would still have a net worth greater than $30 billion. He would remain one of the 30 richest people in the world.
Think about that. Money basically means nothing to Bloomberg. It makes no material difference to his life--anymore than losing a penny would to most people--to spend all this money. At age 77, why the hell not? And wouldn't it be fun to be president? You only live once.
"Bloomberg could spend $100 million every single day on his presidential campaign between now and election day in November--basically more than any candidate except Bloomberg and fellow billionaire Tom Steyer have spent so far in the entire 2019-20 election cycle--and he would still have a net worth greater than $30 billion. He would remain one of the 30 richest people in the world."
Bloomberg may well be successful. He has already made media corporations hugely profitable by flooding the airwaves with his expensive and slick advertising--he has shown something corporate America knows well: carpet-bombing advertisements works if you can afford it--and this is just the beginning. He has bought off everyone with a pulse so he has a large chunk of the political class on his payroll, with many more to come. He will accordingly get terrific mainstream press coverage, the type any other candidate would like, and Bernie Sanders can't even begin to imagine.
In short, Bloomberg is demonstrating the deep problems of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that permits candidates to spend unlimited amounts of their own money on their own campaigns, especially in a period of breathtaking wealth inequality. Why be like the Kochs and Sheldon Adelson and spend a fortune on other people running for office? You are the smart guy after all; spend it on yourself.
If Bloomberg is successful, this could well become the new normal. Presidential elections will be contests between the wealthy who put their own money on the line. Bloomberg demonstrates that no one else could possibly compete with them in terms of resources. We are already a way down that road in Congressional elections. The already fading notion that this is a functional democracy will take another sharp turn in the wrong direction.
Bloomberg explains his decision to run for president as a concern with how Trump is such a dreadful president and that he is best positioned to defeat Trump, restore integrity to governance, and change his deplorable policies, especially on the environment and guns.
Fair enough. But aside from the issue of billionaires buying elections, there is one other extraordinary flaw in his thinking: Bloomberg should be running against Trump as a Republican, not a Democrat. If he actually cared about this country more than stroking his massive ego that is exactly what he would be doing.
This is not such a crazy idea. For starters, Bloomberg is a Republican, or he was until the tea party and then Trump showed up. He fits the profile of the sort of traditional Republican most Americans have been familiar with for generations. He is pro-business, pro-empire, anti-labor, and not especially sympathetic to the concerns of minorities or the dispossessed. These old-school Republicans were committed to the rule of law, however, and to majority rule.
Now Trump has come in and crystallized currents already growing in the Republican Party, like the "tea party" explosion in 2009-10. With his endless lying and rejection of the rule of law, Trump has led the Republicans toward a stronger embrace of authoritarianism, even, dare I say it, fascism. There are discussions about whether Trump would even leave office were he to lose the 2020 presidential election! The career Republican politicians have capitulated to Trump en masse, hence discrediting this party in toto.
Because of the way U.S. elections are structured, we have a two-party system and it is very difficult to replace one of the existing parties with a new one, despite popular support for introducing new ideas into our politics. So the United States is moving toward an exceptionally dangerous place where one of the two main parties is flirting with fascism and dedicated to maintaining political power with only a minority of the country supporting it. It holds the rule of law in contempt.
Bloomberg could have been a real patriot and applied his billions of dollars to challenging Trump and the fascist trend within the Republican party. He could have done everything possible to expose Trump and to locate and encourage anti-Trump Republicans. He could have supported primary challengers on the Republican side to defeat Trump's allies and enablers. He could have built up a parallel party apparatus employing thousands of Republican operatives at big salaries. He probably would have lost, but you never know for sure until you try. Bloomberg could outspend Trump 20 to 1. He would have been able to force public attention to this issue, and keep it there. He might have made Trump completely crack up. At any rate, he would have had an enormous impact that might have helped to slow and begin to reverse the Trumpian drift.
"If Bloomberg is successful in buying the Democratic nomination... The party could disintegrate enough that Trump waltzes to a second term, precisely what Bloomberg claims he does not want to have happen."
Then, if he failed to get the Republican presidential nomination, Bloomberg could throw his support and his resources to the Democrats, as he claims he plans to do now.
He would have been a patriot, perhaps even a hero.
Instead, he has opted to bring his takeover project to the Democratic Party. The Democrats are currently in a profound struggle for determining the course of the party between their progressive and establishment wings. By most accounts, patching it up by November will be crucial for electoral success. Bloomberg's entrance as an establishment savior has won him understandable support from those Democrats who dislike the progressive trend, and believe, erroneously in my opinion, that Bloomberg is the best bet to defeat Trump in November. If Bloomberg is successful in buying the Democratic nomination, or being the kingmaker who decides it, it will generate such anger and antipathy in the progressive wing of the party to the point where even his billions cannot buy off people to see things his way. The party could disintegrate enough that Trump waltzes to a second term, precisely what Bloomberg claims he does not want to have happen.
The moral of the story for establishment Democrats is don't be seduced by Bloomberg and his billions. He will break up the Democrats and cost them the election if he or someone he supports takes the nomination.
So Bloomberg's legacy would be that he left his own party to the neo-fascist crowd and went on to blow-up the Democrats, keeping the Republicans in control.
That is 180 degrees away from being a hero, or a patriot.
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