Who Is To Blame for Trump’s Tariffs?

It goes well beyond just President Trump

American consumers enjoyed the cheap products. Photo: The Editors.

It’s easy to blame President Trump for the tariffs the president announced yesterday that are this morning obliterating trillions of dollars in stock market value, making a cruel joke of Trump’s “make America wealthy again” promise.

But there’s so much blame to go around that just targeting Trump doesn’t really tell the full story with adequate justice.

Who else is at fault?

Congress has the taxing power under the Constitution. The Constitution’s framers wisely placed that power with members of the House of Representatives who face accountability to the voters in elections every two years. (“All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives”). Yet, as a well-done article by Scott Bomboy of the National Constitution Center, “How Congress delegates its taxing powers to the president,” explains, a series of laws passed by Congress, affirmed by Supreme Court decisions dating back to Field v. Clark in 1892, have basically given the president the tariff power. That’s an abdication of congressional responsibility. Congress could take the tariff power away from the president, but it has not done so. Any member of Congress criticizing Trump for the tariffs deserves to be asked why the legislative branch doesn’t take back its authority from the executive on this issue.

Our educational system has failed. Economics usually isn’t taught until college. The tax-rebellion aspects of American history—the American Revolution as a protest against the tea tax, and the Stamp Act, and the Sugar Act, along with the pre-Depression tale of Smoot and Hawley—have been downplayed in favor of an emphasis instead on slavery, abolition, segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement. That history of race in America is important, but so is the economic history of trade and tariffs and free enterprise. The government-run public schools can barely teach reading and writing, so perhaps economics and history are too much to expect, but in this case the failures are having consequences.

The labor movement and the college-educated urban elites both failed when it came to labor rights abroad. Instead of pushing to organize independent labor unions in unfree countries such as Communist China or Vietnam, too many American labor leaders chose to pull back from international affairs and focus instead on organizing workers in U.S. health care, education, and government sectors. Likewise, American consumers and investors enjoyed the cheap products (and the profits from selling them) without moral qualms about the power of the Communist state being used to prevent workers from exercising their free association rights. And when factories closed in places like Janesville, Wisconsin, too many well-intentioned people didn’t have real solutions. Laid-off workers who went back to school at the local technical college ended up worse off, financially, than those who did not. Replacement “green jobs” frequently were a fantasy.

It’s easy to say all this in retrospect, harder to make the case in the moment. But if there is any upside to the Trump tariff disaster it will be from forcing some kind of reckoning that goes beyond mere “blame Trump.” With luck it will be a teachable moment that yields meaningful change—not mainly because of onshoring of newly “protected” activities, though I’m all for made-in-the-U.S.A, but rather because people take a step back, to a higher level of abstraction, to the perspective that is possible when one moves beyond partisan politics to history and economics and the Constitution and human dignity.

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