Trump II as Hoover Redux

At The Hill, Ed Gresser gives a warning on tariffs to Trump and Vance, who will ignore them, and harm the "working class" they claim to be concerned about, by raising the cost of living in numerous ways.

For example:

Image by Allan Ramsay, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

More taxation of working families; less of high-income earners: As this happens, tax policy shifts, with higher burdens on hourly-wage families and lower ones on high-salary families and investment earners. Lower-income families spend much more of their income on goods -- groceries, appliances, transport, clothes, and over-the-counter medicines. A single-parent family, for example, typically spends about 40 percent of its $53,700 average income on goods, compared to 10 percent for a top-end household earning $320,000 or more. So Trump's tariff will hit the single mom four times harder than the country's highest earners. [emphasis in original]

As a pro-capitalist, I think taxation should be abolished, but until we can achieve that, shouldn't such a burden be borne more by those who use more of the government's services?

Be that as it may, it is a shame to watch Trump-Vance so successfully pander to the very people they are about to screw, along with everyone else.

Regarding that, the below amounts to an executive summary of the arguments and historical context therein:

Would a Trump tariff in 2025 bring the same results Hoover's Smoot-Hawley Act got then?

Depression-like policies don't always bring Depression-like results. But recent experience at home and abroad, analysis from across the political spectrum and constitutional rules for trade policy give us four things to expect: higher inflation, lower growth, more taxation of working families and less of investors, and perhaps (depending on how a hypothetical Trump administration implements its program) a constitutional crisis verging on taxation without representation.

It is interesting that at a time it seems like America is sleepwalking into a very dark time, its supposed champion is about to outdo the tyrant her Founders rebelled against: "Trump's proposed 10 percent tariff is well above the 8 percent tariff that George III imposed in the 1773 Tea Ac​​t."

-- CAV