Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
They're Not Tariffs, They're Sanctions -- The American Prospect
https://prospect.org/economy/2025-04-03-theyre-not-tariffs-theyre-sanctions/David Dayen
Stop trying to place coherence on a policy that’s really just a mob boss breaking legs and asking for protection money.
I’m watching the stock market plunge, and the expectations for recession and stagflation rise, along with everyone else. I’m aware of the innumeracy of the Trump administration, apparently using a shortcut AI formula to reset global trade imbalances and trying to bullshit their way through the criticism.
But I think we give too much credit to Donald Trump and his lieutenants when we suggest that they’re pursuing a misguided trade policy, or that they aren’t pairing tariffs with the necessary steps to boost domestic manufacturing. Those things are true, of course: U.S. trade policy has been deeply inequitable for decades, favoring multinationals over workers and the environment, giving benefits to those corporations in free-trade agreements that they could never get through normal legislative channels, and handing over economic decisions to Wall Street. But these careful explanations, however correct, have nothing to do with what we saw on display in the Rose Garden yesterday.
Because these aren’t really tariffs at all.
Sure, in some functional sense, Trump announced a set of levies to be collected on imports upon their entry into the country. But a tariff policy would consider whether Americans have the wherewithal to make that good domestically, whether component parts that go into U.S. manufacturing should be targeted at the same rate as finished goods, and whether government policy has incentivized a transition to domestic production to encourage the investment. Even the Gilded Age era that Trump looks at longingly did not feature across-the-board tariffs; the famed McKinley Tariff of 1890 cut tariffs on sugar, the biggest revenue-raiser of the era.
What Trump is doing is a sanction policy, only he’s doing it against the whole world, all at once, for the assumed harm of “ripping off” the United States for decades. Sanctions have become a dangerously large component of American geopolitical strategy, an instrument of economic war felt disproportionately by the world’s poorest citizens. The stated reason that Russia and North Korea and other rogue states aren’t on the tariff lists is because sanctions have destroyed their ability to have a trading relationship with the U.S. Trump is applying those punitive measures to the rest of the world.
. . .
But I think we give too much credit to Donald Trump and his lieutenants when we suggest that they’re pursuing a misguided trade policy, or that they aren’t pairing tariffs with the necessary steps to boost domestic manufacturing. Those things are true, of course: U.S. trade policy has been deeply inequitable for decades, favoring multinationals over workers and the environment, giving benefits to those corporations in free-trade agreements that they could never get through normal legislative channels, and handing over economic decisions to Wall Street. But these careful explanations, however correct, have nothing to do with what we saw on display in the Rose Garden yesterday.
Because these aren’t really tariffs at all.
Sure, in some functional sense, Trump announced a set of levies to be collected on imports upon their entry into the country. But a tariff policy would consider whether Americans have the wherewithal to make that good domestically, whether component parts that go into U.S. manufacturing should be targeted at the same rate as finished goods, and whether government policy has incentivized a transition to domestic production to encourage the investment. Even the Gilded Age era that Trump looks at longingly did not feature across-the-board tariffs; the famed McKinley Tariff of 1890 cut tariffs on sugar, the biggest revenue-raiser of the era.
What Trump is doing is a sanction policy, only he’s doing it against the whole world, all at once, for the assumed harm of “ripping off” the United States for decades. Sanctions have become a dangerously large component of American geopolitical strategy, an instrument of economic war felt disproportionately by the world’s poorest citizens. The stated reason that Russia and North Korea and other rogue states aren’t on the tariff lists is because sanctions have destroyed their ability to have a trading relationship with the U.S. Trump is applying those punitive measures to the rest of the world.
. . .