A Make-or-Break Test for the World Trade Organization

Back in 2019, I released this video to explain how the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been a net plus, helping to lower trade taxes and other barriers to cross-border commerce.

I’m normally not a fan of international bureaucracies. But, unlike entities such as the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the WTO has a good track record.

Ever since it was created, trade taxes have been falling.

Sadly, though, the WTO has been weakened in recent years. Trump bears some of the blame, to be sure, but other politicians (including Biden) have caused problems because of their protectionist policies.

Foreign politicians also are pushing in the wrong direction. For instance, the European Union may be about to trigger a global trade war by pushing for carbon protectionism.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that this could be an opportunity for a reinvigorated WTO. As reported by Reuters, India will be bringing a case to block the EU’s anti-trade scheme.

Indian plans to file a complaint to the World Trade Organisation over the European Union’s proposal to impose 20% to 35% tariffs on imports of high-carbon goods like steel, iron ore and cement from India, top government and industry sources said. …”In the name of environment protection, EU is introducing a trade barrier that would hit not only Indian exports but also of many other developing countries,” said a top government official with direct knowledge of the matter. The government was planning to file a complaint to the WTO against the EU’s unilateral decision and would seek relief for exporters, particularly small companies, the official said without disclosing further details. India sees the proposed levy as discriminatory and a trade barrier.

Some people may point out that India’s government is very bad on trade, and that’s true. But the fact that Indian politicians are hypocrites does not mean the EU’s protectionism is justified.

Blocking the EU’s awful plan is an opportunity for the WTO to reclaim its role as a protector of the interests of taxpayers and consumers.

Fingers crossed, the world needs free trade!

P.S. Today’s column is about how the WTO hopefully can stop something bad. Unfortunately, I don’t think the organization has the ability to push for anything good. If there is any progress in the future, it will probably come from bilateral and plurilateral free trade agreements.

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Ranking Trade Freedom

Free trade is good and protectionism is bad.

Assuming one agrees with those common-sense observations, the Tholos Foundation’s just-released Trade Barriers Index is a great source of data about which countries are pro-trade and anti-trade.

As you can see, Singapore has the fewest trade barriers (a lower score is good), followed by New Zealand. By contrast, India is in last place with the most trade barriers, followed by Russia.

Sadly, the United States ranks a lowly 65 out of 88 countries that were included in the report.

The Index is filled with data, so it is a treasure trove for wonks.

The part I like best, which is excerpted below, notes that pro-trade nations produce a disproportionate share of global economic output.

The 88 countries in the 2023 TBI house 72 percent of the world’s population. In the freest range, those with a score reaching between 2.5 and 3.0 or lower, only 6 countries with a combined population of 207 million, or 2.6 percent of the world’s people, enjoy the most barrier-free-trade and they produce 11 percent of the world’s GDP… In the mostly-free range, with a score between 3 and 3.5, reside 395 million people or 5 percent of the world’s population in 16 countries where they produce 14 percent of world GDP. In the next range, between 3.5 and 4.0 on the TBI, 7 percent of the world’s population produces 12 percent of global GDP. In the middle range between 4.0 and 4.5, productivity gets a boost due to the inclusion of the United States; in this range 650 million people reside and produce 28 percent of GDP. Then the inefficiencies of trade restrictions start to take a large toll. In the next 4.5 to 5.0 range, nearly 2 trillion people live, 24 percent of the world’s population, but they contribute only 22 percent of GDP. Then in the 5.0 to 5.5 range, in six countries, 8 percent of the world’s people reside and they produce a dismal 3 percent of world GDP. Lastly, in the 5.5 to 6.0 range 20 percent of the world’s population reside in 2 countries, India and Russia, where they produce 5 percent of world GDP.

Let’s close with a comparison of the United States and Singapore.

In every single category, Singapore does better. But the biggest gap is in non-tariff barriers.

Needless to say, both Trump and Biden have contributed to America’s unimpressive score.

P.S. You’ll notice that trade balances are not part of the Trade Barriers Index. That’s because the authors understand trade deficits are irrelevant (or even a positive sign if a nations is attracting a lot of foreign investment).

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The European Union Threatens Global Prosperity with Carbon Protectionism

Recent years have been very depressing for supporters of free trade.

Trump pushed protectionist policies.

Now Biden is pushing protectionist policies.

And the European Union is pushing protectionist policies using global warming as an excuse.

More specifically, EU politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels have rammed through a so-called Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which is euro-speak for a new protectionist tax on imports that are not sufficiently green.

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial summarizes some of the problems.

The European Parliament this week pulled the trigger on the opening shot in a new climate trade war. …Foreign companies that haven’t paid for carbon emissions at home will have to pay a tariff when exporting goods to Europe. …Climate coercion advocates say a tariff is needed to avoid “carbon leakage,” which is their term for the flight of manufacturing to countries with less onerous emissions restrictions. This is a tacit admission that Europe’s climate policies are failing. …European consumers won’t pay higher prices for greener goods unless the Brussels tax man forces them to. …Foreign companies and governments have raised concerns about the European carbon border tax, which imposes complex and costly compliance burdens and then imposes steep default tariffs on companies that don’t play along. China and India are in the crosshairs of this border tax, although companies from any country that doesn’t impose emissions taxes will have to pay. That includes U.S. firms. …Consumers will be the big losers, first in Europe and then elsewhere.

In his Bloomberg column, Professor Tyler Cowen pointed out some practical problems with the EU’s scheme.

There is a right and a wrong way to encourage the world to use greener energy. Unfortunately, the European Union’s move toward a carbon tax on imports — essentially a tariff on products made using too much dirty energy — is the latter. …Economic changes take place at the margin, and currently the EU is engaged in substitution toward coal, a very dirty energy source. …The tariffs will lead to more coal use and a dirtier energy supply. Be suspicious of green energy policies which at first make the problem worse. …So, despite about as strong an incentive as possible — a war — the EU made the harmful rather than the beneficial adjustment. Now it is expecting that much poorer nations, often with worse governance structures, to do better. Not only is this naïve, but it is also protectionist….it’s easy to imagine China and India not improving their energy policies as a result of EU tariffs. They, like the EU, have domestic pressure groups… In general, Western attempts to shape those nations have failed more than they have succeeded. So again the negative short-term results of the policy — more European coal use — could outweigh any longer-run benefits. Even the positive long-run effects are up for grabs. …the tariff hike…makes the exporting nations poorer than they otherwise would be. Poorer nations tend to be less interested in improving their environments… And extreme poverty worsens other global problems… Should EU policy make it more difficult for Africa to industrialize? …Once protectionist measures are in place, they are hard to reverse. The EU would be reaping tariff revenue, and domestic EU industries would be receiving trade protection. Any reclassification of the imports as fundamentally “greener” would require an investigation across borders and clearance through multiple levels of bureaucracy. Such changes will not be easy to accomplish, especially in an era increasingly enamored of trade restrictions. …the most likely scenario will play itself out: The EU will spin its wheels, indulging in protectionism and feeling good about itself — all at the expense of our planet’s future.

The part about “reclassification of imports” is especially worrisome. For all intents and purposes, the EU will have a corruption-enabling process where industries on all sides will have incentives to hire lots of lobbyists.

That will line the pockets of bureaucrats who “retire” and become facilitators, but it won’t be good for anyone else.

Last but not least, Tori Smith explained for American Action Forum that the EU’s protectionist approach is a violation of trade commitments.

International trade law and WTO experts such as Joel Trachtman of Tufts University and Jennifer Hillman of the Council on Foreign Relations have examined at length the areas where a CBAM might trigger a WTO violation… there do seem to be three principles to follow to have a “reduced risk of violating WTO law” when considering a CBAM: (1) the carbon tax must apply to domestic goods and imports; (2) imports from all WTO members must be treated the same; and (3) rebates for exports cannot exceed the carbon tax. …The EU’s CBAM could run afoul of these commitments because it gives special treatment to countries that already have a carbon price. … Compliance with WTO commitments should be a top priority when considering any new tariff or tax.

Sadly, the World Trade Organization already has been weakened, so I won’t be surprised if officials somehow decide to give a green light to the EU’s protectionism.

Which will be a shame since the WTO for many years actually did a good job.

P.S. You won’t be surprised to learn that the Biden Administration also is interested in carbon protectionism. Indeed, there was plenty of green protectionism is his misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.

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The Case for Free Trade

I narrated a video making the case for free trade back in 2019.

This new video from Kite & Key builds on that effort.

Indeed, it also incorporates many of the lessons that were in my video on the benefits of creative destruction.

If you don’t have six minutes to watch the video, here are the four main takeaways.

• Protectionism has a terrible track record in the real world.
• The world has become much richer as trade has expanded.
• We are richer when we focus on our comparative advantage.
• Poor people are hurt the most by protectionist policies.

Allow me to briefly elaborate on the first bullet point.

I’m a big believer in citing real-world examples. When I make my arguments for spending restraint, I share various case studies.

I do the same when debunking Keynesian economics. And when showing the superiority of markets over dirigisme.

So my challenge to protectionists is do the same thing. Show me (and everyone else) the successful examples of trade barriers.

• It wasn’t under Herbert Hoover.
• It wasn’t in Argentina.
• It wasn’t in India.

I’ll preemptively note that the United States in the 1800s is not a good example. The U.S. economy did well during that century, but it was because of policies such as no income tax and no welfare state.

In other words, Trump was wrong on that issue.

P.S. If you like my two trade videos cited above, I also have ones about the trade deficit and the World Trade Organization.

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The Threat – and Soon Reality – of Climate Protectionism

For the first 50-plus years of my life, free trade was in the ascendancy.

Policy makers had learned a big lesson from the Great Depression about how protectionism was economic poison, and various trade agreements after World War II helped reduce trade taxes and other barriers to cross-border commerce.

It also helped that there was a “Washington Consensus” in the late 1900s that supported pro-market reforms in the developing world.

Unfortunately, trade liberalization has ground to a halt. In part, this is the fault of the United States, thanks to the protectionism of both Trump and Biden.

But let’s also make sure the European Union gets a a share of the blame as well. For instance, the one good thing about the EU (free trade among members) also happens to be one of the many bad things about the EU (protectionism against the rest of the world).

But being a protectionist bloc is a trivial problem compared to what is on the horizon. As reported yesterday by the Wall Street Journal, the EU has unveiled a scheme to use climate as an excuse to increase global trade barriers.

The European Union reached an agreement to impose a tax on imports based on the greenhouse gases emitted to make them, inserting climate-change regulation for the first time into the rules of global trade. …The EU is expected to adopt it in the coming weeks as part of a sweeping package of legislation… The plan…has rattled supply chains around the globe and angered the EU’s trading partners, particularly in the developing world… It has also unsettled manufacturers in the U.S. who are concerned the measure would create a new web of red tape to export to Europe. …Europe’s carbon border tax aims to protect European manufacturers from competitors in countries that haven’t regulated carbon-dioxide emissions. …The legislation would require importers to register with authorities and seek authorization to import goods covered by the tax.

Today, the editorial page of the WSJ weighed in on the proposal.

Christmas came early to Europe’s tax accountants this week, although companies might think the occasion feels more like April Fool’s Day. …Europe is…pushing ahead with a carbon border adjustment mechanism, or CBAM, to tax imports on their carbon intensity. Europeans say this border tax is necessary to “level the playing field” for manufacturers that must pay for carbon emissions credits under the Emissions Trading System (ETS). The ETS already makes it less economical for some industries to operate in Europe, leading green activists to note a rise in imports from countries that don’t impose the complex tax. Imagine that. The CBAM would apply to imports from countries that don’t tax carbon emissions. …The biggest losers will be beleaguered European consumers. …carbon tariffs show how climate policy has become an anti-growth project. A better U.S. Administration would fight this, but the Biden White House and Treasury are fellow travelers.

I explained last year why this was a bad idea, noting that it was bad economics and also that it would advance cronyism and be a windfall for lobbyists (especially once the EU tries to calculate the about of untaxed carbon in every product).

But I also wondered if the Biden White House would be on the right side. After all, the US (thankfully) does not have a carbon tax, so you would think that American officials would be fighting against this EU proposal.

Unfortunately, I was being naive. As noted in the WSJ’s editorial, Biden and his team are fellow travelers. Indeed, the nightmare scenario (perhaps even worse the the nightmare scenario of the Trump years) is that Biden will unilaterally impose a version of climate protectionism on the US economy.

P.S. Is anyone surprised that the French were early advocates of this approach?

P.P.S. I’m a fan of the World Trade Organization, but I doubt that the WTO has the will or the ability to save the global economy from climate protectionism.

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Biden’s Very Bad Trumpian Trade Policy

At the start of 2021, shortly before Biden was inaugurated, I expressed hope that he would reverse Trump’s self-destructive protectionism.

Alas, I’ve been disappointed.

On trade issues, Biden has been just about as bad as his predecessor, (he’s also been as bad as Trump with regards to spending, but that’s a topic for another day).

The Wall Street Journal editorialized last month about this unfortunate similarity. Here are some of the highlights…or lowlights would be a better term since the net result of protectionism is to hurt taxpayers and consumer.

President Biden has rolled back some of Donald Trump’s destructive tariffs, but not enough, and they’re still doing economic harm. New analyses of Mr. Trump’s Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs show how consumers and manufacturers are still paying for the border taxes that benefit only a few companies. A study by Harbor Aluminum for the Beer Institute finds that the 10% tariff on imported aluminum cost U.S. beverage manufacturers $1.7 billion from March 2018 through August 2022. About 93% of the $1.7 billion has been pocketed by domestic aluminum producers and smelters in the U.S. and Canada. …By raising the cost of production, tariffs constrain manufacturers, who cut jobs and pass costs to consumers. …Repealing the Trump Section 232 tariffs could reduce prices at the margin. The longer they stay in place the more they deserve to be called the Biden-Trump tariffs.

Since the above column mentioned the Section 232 tariffs, this would be an opportune moment to cite the Tax Foundation’s research on the topic.

…economists have reached…negative conclusions regarding the impacts of the recent Section 232 tariffs on the economy. Lydia Cox and Kadee Russ, using an estimate derived from a Federal Reserve Board paper, calculated that the Section 232 tariffs reduced manufacturing employment by about 75,000 jobs. Kyle Handley and other economists looked at the impacts of the import tariffs on export growth in the U.S. and found that companies exposed to the Section 232 tariffs experienced reduced export growth. This occurred because the cost of their inputs rose due to the tariffs, which hindered firms’ ability to increase their exports. For each 1 percent increase in the tariffs on steel and aluminum, export growth fell by 0.11 percent. …The aluminum tariffs in particular have disproportionately harmed certain industries. …Ford and General Motors estimated that the tariffs cost them about $1 billion each the first year they were in effect—roughly $700 per vehicle produced.

And here’s the Tax Foundation’s estimate of how the economy would benefit if these taxes on trade were repealed.

Since I’ve been criticizing Biden for being a protectionist, I’ll close by speculating whether Republicans have learned from Trump’s protectionist mistakes.

Here are some excerpts from a column in the Wall Street Journal by former Congressman Jeb Hensarling.

Numerous studies have shown that almost all the costs of tariffs initiated under the Trump administration were paid by American consumers and businesses. …According to the American Action Forum, Mr. Trump’s tariffs combined have increased consumer costs by approximately $51 billion a year. …Republicans love to talk about “draining the swamp” in Washington. But the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration empowered hundreds of bureaucrats at the Commerce Department and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to grant waivers under what can at best be described as an opaque process with discretionary standards. …A schedule of tariffs doesn’t drain the swamp. It fills it with well-connected lawyers and lobbyists who know how to work the system.

The bottom line is that protectionism does not work if Republicans do it, and protectionism does not work if Democrats do it.

Both parties should have learned from Hoover’s horrible mistake.

P.S. A big problem is that politicians genuinely don’t understand that a “trade deficit” is automatically and necessarily offset by a capital surplus. Helping them to understand this fact is key to renewing support for free trade.

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Defending International Trade

As a fan of globalization – but not globalism, I endorse this new video from Reason, which punctures myths from protectionists such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders (and Joe Biden).

If you don’t have a spare seven minutes to watch the video, it addresses three specific points.

1. Does cross-border trade destroy manufacturing jobs?
2. Did liberalizing trade with China take American jobs?
3. Does trade make us vulnerable because of supply chains?

Plenty of good material, but I also would have challenged protectionists to provide a successful example of protectionism. Today or in the past.

Did protectionism work for Herbert Hoover – or anyone else – in the 1930s?

Did protectionism work for Juan Peron in Argentina in the 1940s and 1950s?

Is protectionism working for India’s economy in the 21st century?

Did protectionism work for Donald Trump between 2017 and 2020?

The answer is no in every single case. So it is no surprise that scholarly research (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) shows that free trade is a better approach if a nation wants more jobs and higher income.

But protectionists make one accurate point. While free trade increases overall employment, that does not mean every worker in every industry benefits.

In his New York Times column, Peter Coy explores this topic.

The skepticism about free markets…has gotten only stronger…only 44 percent of Republican voters…viewed free trade mainly as an opportunity for growth through increased exports. …the standard Econ 101 argument for free trade… First, assert that trade increases prosperity by allowing each country to specialize in what it’s best at. …Second, acknowledge that not everyone wins from free trade… Third, state that this problem can be easily solved: Everyone in society can be made better off if the winners share some of their gains with the losers. …In reality, the winners from trade rarely share much of their gains with the losers. The losers remain losers, and they often vote for candidates who put up tariff walls. …the free traders have failed to deliver on their promises to make free trade and open markets work for all.

A reasonably fair article, but I don’t think “free traders have failed” for reasons I explained in one of my videos from earlier this year.

If you don’t want to spend three minutes watching the video, I explain that all trade destroys jobs. And that includes trade within a nation.

It’s part of “creative destruction,” which I’ve labeled as the best and worst part of capitalism.

Millions of jobs get destroyed every year, in part because new technology, new competitors, and new innovations.

That’s bad news for many people, but it’s also the process that creates even more new jobs.

And it’s the process that has made all of us so much richer than our ancestors. And that includes the ancestors of people who lost jobs because of domestic or international trade.

P.S. Click here, here, and here for some very sound observations from America’s best post-WWII president.

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Help the World’s Poor with International Trade

I support free trade for selfish reasons. I want my life to be better and I want my country to be richer.

But I also support free trade for selfless reasons. I want other people in other countries to be richer as well.

And rejecting protectionism usually is a way to achieve both my selfish and selfless goals.

But not always. Let’s look at some new evidence about the selfless benefits of open trade and globalization.

In an article for VoxEU, Maksym Chepeliev, Maryla Maliszewska, Israel Osorio Rodarte, Maria Filipa Seara e Pereira, and Dominique van der Mensbrugghe summarize their new research on global value chains.

The authors look at the economic consequences if some or all companies are told they have to rely solely on domestic suppliers (“reshoring”) compared to a world where they engage in cross-border trade.

As you can can see from this chart, you get bad results from some protectionism (reshoring leading economies) or more protectionism (reshoring all economies). Liberalization, by contrast, leads to good results.

Here’s some of what they wrote about their results.

A possible reshoring of production by the leading economies and China would have a negative impact in most regions, with real income decreasing by 1.5% worldwide. A localised world takes the biggest toll on developing countries with the Middle East and North Africa, Rest of East Asia and Pacific, and Europe and Central Asian regions being hit the most severely (Figure 1). However, countries subsidising domestic production would also be worse off as reshoring decreases trade and income, limits the variety of products available to producers and consumers, and increases prices.

If you look closely at Figure 1, you will notice that the United States and other rich nations suffer relatively small income losses from protectionism.

So this is a case where the selfish argument for free trade does not play a big role.

But the selfless argument is very strong. The authors point out that poor nations are the ones that reap big rewards with expanded trade.

Or suffer big losses in a world with more protectionism.

Under the ‘Reshoring all’ scenario, 51.8 million additional people would fall into extreme poverty by 2030, the equivalent to a 0.6% increase in the global extreme poverty headcount ratio. …The ‘GVC-friendly’ scenario, on the other hand, could lift 21.5 million people from extreme poverty by 2030. …In addition, we find that 56.2 million would graduate to global middle-class status, measured as individuals with a per capita consumption of more than PPP $10.00 a day.

Figure 4 shows that protectionism produces more extreme poverty while expanded trade saves people from that awful fate.

Let’s close with two simple observations.

• First, free trade is a way for those of us in rich countries to help improve the lives of people in poor countries. Foreign aid, by contrast, has a long track record of failure since it mostly lines the pockets of the political elite and often actually subsidizes bad policy.
• Second, some people argue that there are geopolitical reasons to restrict trade with misbehaving nations such as Russia and China. That certainly may be true (not my area of expertise), but such restrictions should be imposed only if the geopolitical benefits exceed the economic costs.

Also, any discussion about trade is incomplete without an acknowledgement that not everyone benefits in the short run from changing patterns of trade.

But that’s true whether the trade is between countries or within countries.

We should acknowledge that new competitors, new technologies, and new products are part of “creative destruction,” which can cause pain for some people in the short run.

The key thing to understand, however, is that this is the process that makes societies far more prosperous in the long run. Moreover, when politicians interfere, they will cause more pain for more people in both the short run and the long run.

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Trade, Jobs, and Wages

I’m a knee-jerk supporter of free trade, which simply means I don’t think politicians and bureaucrats should be able to interfere with my freedom to buy good and services from people who happen to live in other nations.

But my support for free trade is not just based on ideology. I also cite data on how trade taxes and other restrictions make nations poorer.

Simply stated, trade barriers (like other forms of government intervention) make an economy less efficient.

And the negative effects go beyond overall economic output. Researchers also find job losses, lower productivity, and increased inequality.

Today, let’s look at some new research on this topic. The IMF earlier this year released a new working paper authored by Kim Beaton, Valerie Cerra, and Metodij Hadzi-Vaskov.

Here are the main results.

…firms in countries and industries experiencing greater competition from imports reduce employment slightly. …Even so, the low elasticity of employment growth to imports indicates a limited adverse impact. …Contrary to popular belief and anti-globalization sentiment, import competition is associated with higher average wage growth across the global sample of firms…, driven by the EMDEs… Taking employment and wages together, import growth in an industry leads to a rise in the wage bill of domestic firms in the same industry. Thus, while import competition generates some job dislocations, the overall impact on earnings of workers in the same industry is positive.

Here’s a chart that was included with the study.

One unexpected finding from the study is that rich nations are more likely to enjoy job gains.

The job loss associated with import competition appears to be dominated by the behavior of firms in emerging and developing economies… In contrast, the import shock provides a statistically significant positive boost to firms’ employment in advanced economies.

And here’s a finding that should not surprise anyone.

…we find relatively positive outcomes of import competition on exposed firms, including higher sales, profits, wage growth, and investment. Moreover, the import shock to exposed firms, and the ensuing employment changes, do not take place in isolation. Import growth often goes hand in hand with export growth, which spurs job creation.

But I didn’t like everything I found in the paper. In some circumstances, trade reduces inequality, but by hurting those with high incomes rather than helping those with low incomes.

Our results also show that firms experiencing higher imports shocks are those with higher average wage levels. Thus, to the extent that employment growth is lower in these more exposed firms, it could lead to lower inequality.

For some of our friends on the left, this is a good outcome. Crazy.

Fortunately, trade generally helps everyone, so this quirky result is an exception rather than the rule.

The bottom line is that free trade is an overall winner for the economy. Does that mean that everyone benefits in short run? Of course not.

Jobs always get destroyed when there’s competition. And that’s true whether the competition comes from inside a country or outside a country.

The goal, of course, is to have a vibrant economy that regularly produces plenty of new jobs to offset any job losses.

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Don’t Sweat the Trade Deficit

When the Commerce Department announced in February that the United States had a record trade deficit for 2021, I shared this video to help make the point that those trade numbers were that year’s “least important economic news.”

The main thing to understand is that a trade deficit is simply the flip side of an investment surplus.

When Americans use dollars to buy goods from other nations, those dollars are only valuable to foreigners because they can use them to buy things from America.

In many cases, they buy American goods and services. But they also use many of those dollars to invest in the U.S. economy.

That’s generally a positive thing. It’s a vote of confidence about America’s economic future.

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe shares my viewpoint. He recently opined on this issue, echoing the important insight about the link between trade flows and investment flows.

The US trade deficit hit an all-time high in March, widening to nearly $110 billion as the nation imported considerably more goods than it exported. That can’t be good, right? Actually, it’s fine. …It’s not an indication of actual economic weakness. …Quite the contrary: All things being equal, imports are usually evidence of economic vitality and success. …The dollars Americans spend on imports aren’t “lost.” They are exchanged for desirable and affordable goods, services, parts, and commodities that strengthen Americans’ economy while elevating their US lifestyle. Better still, those dollars then come back to the United States, where they are used to invest in American assets or buy American exports, creating even more value and putting even more Americans to work. …a trade “deficit” isn’t a debt we owe. It is an accounting entry that tells us how much more we were enriched by foreigners than they were by us. ..the US economy has some real problems. Happily, the trade deficit isn’t one of them. Imports are good. And more imports? They’re good too.

This does not mean, however, that everyone is a winner.

As I explain in this video, jobs are destroyed when there is trade between nations. But I also point out that jobs are destroyed by trade inside a nation’s borders.

That’s bad news for workers in sectors that are dying (such as typewriter makers after personal computers hit the market).

What’s important is whether the new jobs that are created exceed the number of jobs that are lost.

This is what is called “creative destruction.” It’s painful, but it is why we are much richer today than we were in the past.

The good news is that this usually happens…at least if politicians resist the temptation to over-tax, over-spend, and over-regulate.

The bottom line is that free trade is much better for long-run prosperity than protectionism.

Unless, of course, you think it’s a good idea to copy the policies of Herbert Hoover.

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The Economics of War, Part II: Trade Restrictions Make a Nation Weaker

Way back in 2010, I explained that Paul Krugman was wrong to think that wars were good for the economy.

Indeed, he was more wrong than usual. The additional spending for the military isn’t “stimulus,” so his usual Keynesian argument was misguided.

Moreover, he didn’t seem to understand that wars also destroy existing wealth.

Today we are going to look at how war can teach us another economic lesson.

The United States and other major nations have responded to Russia’s assault on Ukraine by imposing trade restrictions with Russia.

If protectionists are correct, these steps (effectively imposing an extreme Russian version of Biden’s “buy America” policy) should strengthen Putin.

Yet that’s obviously not the purpose of the sanctions.

Instead, officials from western nations understand that these trade barriers will weaken Russia’s economy.

By the way, this isn’t the only example of nations using trade restrictions to hurt their enemies.

The U.S. trade embargo with Cuba is a prominent example, and there are also restrictions on trade with Venezuela.

Why? Because limiting trade is bad for a nation’s economy.

Moreover, during the Vietnam War, the United States mined North Vietnam’s harbors.

Why? Because limiting trade is bad for a nation’s economy.

And don’t forget the British navy’s blockade against France during the Napoleonic wars.

Why? Because limiting trade is bad for a nation’s economy.

So why, then, do politicians like Donald Trump and Joe Biden support imposing the same policies on the United States?

P.S. Imposing sanctions on Russia is not good for the U.S. economy (or the European economies, the Japanese economy, etc), but such policies are strategically sensible if the damage on the Russian economy is much greater.

P.P.S. There is now discussion about kicking Russia out of the World Trade Organization. Once again, the purpose would be to hurt Russia’s economy. Which should raise uncomfortable questions for people who think the United States would benefit by choosing to give up membership.

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The Failure of Bidenomics, Part III

In Part I of this series, I pointed out that Biden’s plethora of proposed handouts and subsidies would lead to higher prices and more inefficiency. And in Part II, I explained that his discussion of inflation was embarrassingly inaccurate.

In today’s column, we’re going to analyze his strident support for protectionist “Buy America” provisions, which drive up costs for taxpayers by making it harder for foreign firms to compete for government contracts and thus give American firms the ability to charge higher prices.

How much of a burden are these policies? How much more are taxpayers having to pay because governments can’t opt for the lowest qualified bidder?

According to research shared by the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), American taxpayers lose $94 billion per year.

The good news (if we have a very generous definition of “good”) is that procurement protectionism “only” pushes up costs in the United States by 5.6 percent.

Our dirigiste friends in the European Union suffer much more. Their procurement protectionism results in average markups of 17.6 percent, costing European taxpayers a staggering $471 billion.

But taxpayers are not the only losers.

In a 2017 study for PIIE, Gary Hufbauer and Euijin Jung explain that nations also lose exports because of procurement protectionism.

Buy American provisions are often enacted because politicians associate the patriotic slogan with the creation of domestic jobs. In fact, these laws are counterproductive: They are costly for taxpayers, they curtail exports, and they lose more jobs than they create. “Buy American” was bad policy in 1930 and does even more harm today. …Buy American dulls competition for everything that federal, state, and local governments purchase. Consequently, taxpayers pay inflated prices for new infrastructure, the latest information technology, and routine maintenance of subways, bridges, and airports. …Quantification is difficult, but the major federal Buy American laws probably equate to tariff equivalent barriers of at least 25 percent on federal purchases. State laws vary in scope and protective degree, but on average they probably entail at least 10 percent tariff equivalent barriers. …When Buy American policies are championed at home they are emulated abroad—in the form of Buy European, Buy Mexican, Buy Japanese, and other local content laws and policies. Consequently, US goods and services face severe barriers in foreign procurement markets. …US exports could expand by $189 billion annually if OECD countries all repealed their existing local content laws.

The Heritage Foundation’s Tori Smith authored a report when Trump was pushing his version of procurement protectionism. Here’s some of what she wrote.

Domestic content requirements, like those found in the Buy American Act, the Berry Amendment, and various other laws, result in additional regulatory burdens for producers, and increase costs for American taxpayers. All for little or no gain: The policies are unlikely to stimulate job growth in target industries. …Existing laws and provisions regarding domestic content requirements…are extremely onerous and complicated burdens. They have three main effects: (1) creating additional regulatory hurdles for producers; (2) costing American taxpayers more than they would otherwise pay for government projects; and (3) they are unlikely to yield job growth in target industries like the steel sector.

Here are the most important passages from her report.

…to eliminate all existing domestic content requirements….would create hundreds of thousands of American jobs across the country and contribute billions of dollars to U.S. gross domestic product.

And this chart shows how various states would benefit if there was open competition for government procurement.

I’ll close with three additional points.

First, it’s disappointing that Biden is continuing Trump’s protectionist policies. It’s even more disappointing that he wants to expand upon them. This is one area where people thought Biden might move policy in the right direction.

For some historical perspective on the failure of the Trump-Biden approach, the National Taxpayers Union helpfully shared the views of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

Second, some national security experts make a very reasonable argument that the Pentagon should not make itself dependent on purchases from nations such as China.

But this is at most an argument for “Buy from Allied Nations,” not an argument for “Buy America.”

Third, Biden is perversely consistent. Everything he is doing will increase costs for taxpayers and consumers in order to bestow undeserved benefits on special-interest groups.

P.S. The argument for competition in the market for government procurement is the same as the general argument for free trade. And since we’re on the topic of trade, remember that dollars sent overseas as part of a procurement contract will come back to the United States, either to purchase American exports or as part of investment in the U.S. economy.

P.P.S. None of this changes the fact that the public sector should be much smaller. In a libertarian society, there would be far lower levels of government procurement.

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The Least Important Economic News of 2021

Three years ago, I unveiled this video to help explain that trade deficits are nothing to worry about.

The most important thing to understand from the video is that the flip side of a trade deficit is a capital surplus.

To be more specific, foreigners earn dollars by selling products to Americans. They then use those dollars to buy goods and services from American producers, or they use those dollars to invest money in the American economy.

And when foreigners choose to invest their dollars, that necessarily is accompanied by a trade deficit.

At the risk of understatement, it’s not bad that foreigners want to invest in the United States.

Why am I discussing this topic today?

Because we have final data on trade flows for 2021. Here are some excerpts from a report by Ana Swanson for the New York Times.

The U.S. trade deficit in goods soared to record levels in 2021, topping $1 trillion… The overall trade deficit in both goods and services also hit an annual record, rising 27 percent as the country’s imports far outpaced its exports, according to data released by the Commerce Department… Imports surged by $576.5 billion, or 20.5 percent, rising sharply from a slump at the onset of the pandemic, as both the quantity and the price of the foreign products that Americans purchased increased. Businesses spent heavily on equipment and machinery… Exports grew 18.5 percent, or by $394.1 billion.

The correct reaction to this story is a big yawn.

Simply stated, I don’t care if Americans bought more from foreigners than foreigners bought from Americans. Just like I don’t care that I have a trade deficit with my local grocery stores (I’m always buying food from them and they never buy anything from me!).

Here’s another sentence from the story that deserves some attention.

Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the ballooning trade deficit last year mostly reflected the country’s continued strong economic growth.

To elaborate, if the United States economy is growing, that means Americans can afford to buy more stuff, regardless of where those goods and services originate.

And if other places in the world are growing slower (such as Europe), that means people from those areas can’t afford to buy as much stuff that originates in the United States.

P.S. A few years ago, I criticized Trump’s trade deal with China.

At the risk of patting myself on the back, I was right. Here are a few more sentences from the NYT story.

The data also revealed the shortcomings of a trade deal that Mr. Trump signed with China in 2020. …China committed to buying an additional $200 billion worth of American goods and services above a 2017 baseline by the end of 2021. But those purchases did not materialize. …China actually bought none of the additional $200 billion of exports that the trade deal had promised. …the trade deal Mr. Trump signed in 2020 “did not address the core problems” with China’s state-led economy.

P.P.S. While it is generally a good thing when foreigners invest in the U.S. economy, that’s only true if they investing in the private sector (stocks, bonds, real estate, etc). By contrast, if foreigners are using dollars to buy government bonds, that obviously doesn’t help growth.

But the problem isn’t that foreigners are buying government debt. That’s merely a symptom of the actual problem, which is excessive spending by politicians in Washington.

The moral of the story is that free trade is desirable…and small government is desirable.

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Hopes and Fears for 2022

It’s an annual tradition (2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, etc) to list a handful of things that I hope might happen in the upcoming year, as well as the things I fear may happen.

Sadly, since I understand the economics of “public choice” (something Thomas Jefferson also implicitly understood) it’s always easier to envision the latter category.

But it’s good to begin a new year with optimism, so here are the good things that hopefully will happen in 2022.

Biden’s So-Called Build Back Better Stays Dead – The President squandered money on a fake stimulus and an infrastructure boondoggle, but we dodged the biggest bullet when Democrats couldn’t get all 50 of their Senators to support a multi-trillion dollar, growth-sapping expansion in taxes and spending.

The Supreme Court Ends Civil Asset Forfeiture – This was on my list last year, but the odious practice of “theft by government” continues. That being said, I still think it won’t survive if the Supreme Court has a chance to make a ruling (especially since America’s best Justice is very aware of the problem).

Republicans Win Congress in 2022 – I don’t have much faith in Republicans to do the right thing (especially when a Republican is in the White House), but I hope they win the House and Senate in November because they will oppose big tax increases while Democrats control the White House – even if only for partisan reasons.

In the “honorable mention” or “runner-up” category, I also hope to see further progress for school choice in 2022.

And I used to list a collapse of Venezuela’s reprehensible socialist government as one of my annual “hopes,” but I’ve largely given up (particularly since Latin Americans seem foolishly susceptible to “leftist saviors“).

Now let’s shift to the bad things that I fear will happen over the next 365 days.

Biden’s BBB Budget Plan Springs Back to Life – The President’s “Build Back Better” plan may be on life support, but sadly it’s not quite dead. I fear a scaled-down (but still horrible) version of the legislation may get approved this year. Senator Manchin of West Virginia, for instance, says he is willing to support a $1.5 trillion package and I fear the left eventually will decide that 50 percent of a (moldy and weevil-ridden) loaf is better than none.

Biden’s Remains a Protectionist – I hoped last year that Biden would reduce government trade taxes. Not because he believes in economic liberty, but simply because he wouldn’t want to continue a Trump-era policy. But that didn’t happen, and I now fear he’ll continue with protectionism in 2022. I don’t even have much hope that he’ll resuscitate the World Trade Organization.

New Tax Cartels – One of last year’s big defeats was the creation of a global tax cartel by governments. Barring some sort of miracle that prevents implementation, greedy politicians have set up a system that will require all nations to have a minimum corporate tax of 15 percent. That’s very bad news for workers, consumers, and shareholders, but I’m even more worried about the precedent it creates for additional tax cartels and ever-higher tax rates.

I’ll close by noting that last year’s list included the possibility of Kamala Harris becoming president.

But Biden has been so bad that it’s unclear that Harris would make things worse.

P.S. For the “fears” category, I could – and probably should – list entitlements every single year. Simply stated, the country is in deep long-run trouble because of an aging population and poorly designed tax-and-transfer programs. Years ago, I was semi-hopeful that we would get Medicaid and Medicare reform.

Now that seems like a distant dream and the real battle is preventing further entitlement expansions such as Biden’s per-child handout.

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Biden’s Trumpian Trade Policy

For self-interested reasons, I obviously like my video on the merits of free trade and the downside of protectionism.

But now I’ll also be recommending this new video from Liberty International.

It has some great examples, such as Washington’s corrupt trade barriers to sugar (as well as other examples of foolish agriculture subsidy programs).

And there’s some excellent analysis of how developing nations are hurt by the double-edged sword of protectionism and foreign aid.

What happened to Haiti is especially tragic.

My only criticism (and this is a sin of omission) is that there wasn’t enough time to explain why people shouldn’t fixate on the trade deficit – which is, after all, simply the flip side of a capital surplus.

For purposes of today’s column, though, I want to focus more on the politics of trade rather than the economics of trade.

That’s because Trump and Biden are basically the Bobbsey Twins of protectionism.

In his New York Times column, Binyamin Appelbaum explains why Trump’s China tariffs backfired.

I obviously agree, but Appelbaum only mentions in passing that Biden has not done much to reverse that policy.

Tariffs on imports from China have refilled the employee parking lot at Stoughton Trailers in Evansville, Wis. …the rest of us are paying for those jobs. The tariffs have contributed to a shortage of chassis in the middle of an import boom, one reason that American ports are gridlocked. Tariffs also drive up prices. American chassis are beginning to roll off production lines, but they cost more than pretariff Chinese chassis, which raises the price of everything that travels by chassis. …the government has decided to limit competition, a lazy approach that is both expensive and counterproductive. Taxing imports from China gives the appearance of punishing China, but the cost of the tariffs is paid by Americans. …Mr. Biden should make a clean break with Mr. Trump’s destructive tariffs. The right recipe is simple…, maintain an environment in which companies can flourish, ensure workers reap the benefits.

So at what point do Trump’s tariffs become Biden’s tariffs?

Technically, we hit that point in late January of 2021.

To make matters worse, Biden is also imposing new trade taxes on American consumers and businesses.

The Wall Street Journal opined today on Biden’s latest protectionist initiative.

President Biden says he feels your pain regarding inflation… Too bad his Administration’s policies reveal different priorities. Witness the Commerce Department’s decision to raise tariffs on lumber, which will raise building costs in an already strained housing market. The Commerce Department said last week that it will double the average tariff on Canadian softwood lumber to 17.9% from 8.99%. …There’s rarely a good time for trade restrictions, but the timing of this one is tragicomical. The same month Commerce revealed its tariff plan, lumber hit a record price of $1,650 per thousand board-feet, more than three times the level before pandemic supply shortages began. …The Biden Administration’s tariff resumes the U.S.-Canada lumber war where President Trump left off. …President Biden campaigned against his predecessor’s tariffs, but his trade policy in office has been nearly as protectionist. He’s kept most tariffs in place.

Kept most in place…and now adding more.

This is very sad, particularly since I had hoped that was one area where Biden might actually move policy in the right direction.

No, I didn’t think Biden actually understood why free trade is good (he’s always been a proponent of bigger government, after all).

But I hoped he would do the right thing simply to show he differed from Trump. Those hopes have been dashed.

P.S. If you want more reasons to be concerned, Biden also hasn’t done much to resuscitate the World Trade Organization and he isn’t pushing back on his party’s embrace of carbon protectionism.

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Reduce Poverty with Free Enterprise

I’ve shared several videos (here, here, here, and here) that use rigorous data to show that grinding poverty and severe material deprivation was the norm for humanity – until capitalism gained a foothold a few hundred years ago.

Fortunately, as free enterprise has gradually spread around the world, there’s been a remarkable increase in living standards, leading to a stunning drop in poverty.

For today’s column, let’s look at some new academic evidence about the link between capitalism and poverty reduction.

Here the abstract of a new study by Colin Doran and Thomas Stratmann of George Mason University.

We study the relationship between economic freedom and poverty rates in 151 countries over a twenty–year period. Using the World Bank’s poverty headcounts of those living on less than $1.90 per day, $3.20 per day, and $5.50 per day, we find evidence that economic freedom, measured by the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, is associated with lower poverty rates. We also test the effect of various components of the Index of Economic Freedom. We find that a government’s integrity and a country’s trade freedom are associated with lower poverty rates.

Keep in mind that this study is looking at the relationship between free markets and extreme poverty (not the relatively comfortable type of poverty that exists in the United States).

More specifically, the authors were investigating the impact of public policy on people who live on between about $700-$2000 per year. In other words, poor people in poor nations.

And the big takeaway is that capitalism leads to less poverty, but what really makes a difference is to have open trade and less corruption.

The good news is that we know how to get free trade. Just get rid of protectionist policies.

The bad news is that corruption in government is a much more challenging topic. Yes, shrinking government would mean less opportunity for graft, but that doesn’t solve the problem of delivering “public goods” in a competent and honest manner.

P.S. Foreign aid makes things worse rather than better.

P.P.S. Click here is you want to learn about poverty reduction in rich nations.

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Democrats Embrace Protectionist Tax Hike on Lower-Income and Middle-Class Americans

I’ve been warning, over and over and over again, that a European-style welfare state means huge tax increases on ordinary people.

Simply stated, there are not enough rich people to finance big government (even Paul Krugman agrees).

This means Joe Biden and Democrats need to make a choice: What matters most, their desire to make government bigger, or their promise not to impose higher taxes on families making less than $400K per year?

We now have the answer to that question, and I hope nobody is surprised to learn that they picked government over taxpayers.

But what is surprising is that they picked the Trump approach of protectionist taxes on global trade.

Here are some excerpts from a report by the New York Times.

Democrats have agreed to include a tax on imports from nations that lack aggressive climate change policies as part of a sweeping $3.5 trillion budget plan… The move to tax imports was made public Wednesday, the same day that the European Union outlined its own proposal for a similar carbon border tax, a novel tool that is designed to protect domestic manufacturing. …skeptics caution that a carbon border tax, which has yet to be implemented by any country, would be difficult to carry out, and could anger trading partners and face a challenge at the World Trade Organization. Unlike the Europeans, who outlined their plan in a 291-page document, Democrats released no details about their tax proposal on Wednesday. Calling it simply a “polluter import fee,” the framework does not explain what would be taxed, at what rate or how much revenue it would expect to generate. …verifying the amount of carbon…produced by foreign manufacturing is tricky, experts say.

It’s always a bad idea to give politicians a new source of revenue.

But it’s a worse idea to give them a new source of revenue that will require bureaucrats to measure the amount of carbon produced by every imported good. As I pointed out a few days ago when discussing the European Union’s version of this protectionist scheme, that’s a huge recipe for cronyism and favoritism.

P.S. I’ll be very curious to see how different international bureaucracies react to these anti-trade proposals. The OECD and IMF, while usually bad on fiscal issues, historically have favored unfettered trade. And the World Trade Organization exists specifically to protect global commerce. But will these organizations now change their position to curry favor with the nations that control their purse strings?

The theory of “public choice” suggests we shouldn’t be optimistic.

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The European Union’s Carbon Protectionism

Over the past four years, Donald Trump presumably was the biggest threat to global trade.

His ignorant protectionism hurt American consumers and businesses – and undermined the competitiveness of the U.S. economy.

Over the next four years (and beyond), it’s quite likely that the biggest threat to global trade will be the European Union.

More specifically, politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels want to toss a hand grenade into cross-border commerce by imposing trade taxes on nations that don’t impose carbon taxes.

The Wall Street Journal has a must-read editorial about this threat to world commerce.

Western politicians have failed to persuade their own voters to commit economic suicide by banning fossil fuels, and forget about China, Russia or India. The climate lobby’s fallback, which is starting to emerge, is to punish the foreigners and their own consumers with climate tariffs. Bureaucrats at the European Commission are due to unveil the proposed Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) later this month… Brussels wants to impose tariffs to bring the cost of carbon-dioxide emissions tied to an imported good into line with what a European producer would pay to produce the same good. …a carbon tariff would impose an enormous burden on companies seeking to sell to the EU—even the low-emitting firms—and as a result probably will trigger a trade war. …Under the leaked plan, foreign firms would have to undertake detailed carbon audits to report emissions to EU regulators, and then would have to work out what proportion of the emissions attributable to goods shipped to the EU already were covered by carbon taxes elsewhere. …The choice between costly compliance or a punitive default tariff risks deterring smaller foreign companies from trying to navigate this system.

Needless to say, the so-called carbon audits will create big openings for cronyism and favoritism.

Lobbyists will be fat and happy while businesses and consumers will get hit with higher costs.

The editorial’s conclusion wisely warns that it would be a big mistake for Europeans to trigger a trade war.

Western elites haven’t convinced their voters to pay the price of their climate obsessions. Like Donald Trump, they now want to blame foreigners. In the process they’ll force their consumers to pay more for imports and domestic goods, and they’ll harm their own exporters if countries retaliate. The last thing the world economy needs as it recovers from a pandemic is a climate-change trade war.

Writing for Forbes, Tilak Doshi speculates whether the United States will copy the Europeans.

…the European Parliament overwhelmingly endorsed the creation of a “carbon border adjustment mechanism” (CBAM) that would shield EU companies against cheaper imports from countries with “weaker” climate policies. …Now that the Biden administration has elevated climate change to its highest priority across the whole of government, it would seem that the EU and the US working together with like-minded governments in Canada and the UK would be in a position to set up a “trans-Atlantic climate club”  and thereby impose a global cost on carbon emissions. …Australian Trade Minister Dan Tehan labelled carbon tariffs “a new form of protectionism.” …For most developing countries, “worries of an increasing carbon footprint generated by economic growth are second to worries that growth many not happen at all.” …What sets off this new protectionism from its predecessors is the sheer scope of its application.

I’m actually hopeful on this issue.

Biden and his team doubtlessly are sympathetic to the E.U.’s initiative, but I don’t think Congress will approve a carbon tax on the American people.

And if the U.S. doesn’t have a carbon tax, there wouldn’t be any reason to impose discriminatory taxes on other nations that also don’t have that levy.

That being said, the Biden Administration would have some leeway to cause problems. For instance, would they push for the World Trade Organization to accept the E.U.’s attack on free trade?

When dealing with politicians, I always hope for the best, but assume the worst.

P.S. Here are my seven reasons to support free trade, as well as my eight questions for protectionists.

P.P.S. You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that the French were early advocates of carbon protectionism.

P.P.P.S. Some American politicians have pushed for regulatory protectionism.

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Biden’s Failure on Trade

Biden campaigned for higher taxes and a bigger welfare state, so I haven’t been surprised by his misguided fiscal agenda.

That being said, I was modestly hopeful that he would move trade policy in the right direction after four years of Trump’s protectionism.

To be sure, I didn’t think he would do the right thing because of some long-hidden belief in sound economics. But I figured he might reduce trade barriers simply to do the opposite of his predecessor.

We should be so lucky. Regardless of the policy, we’ve been getting statism.

Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post is not impressed by Biden’s protectionism.

Several months after he left office, some of President Donald Trump’s most foolish economic policies remain in place: his sweeping trade restrictions. …Trump began waging a series of trade wars three years ago — not primarily with U.S. adversaries, mind you, but with friends. Among the dumbest and most self-sabotaging measures were global tariffs levied on nearly $50 billion of imported steel and aluminum. …the countries most affected by Trump’s move were our close economic and military allies, including the European Union, Canada and Japan. …Despite Trump’s claims otherwise, the cost of the tariffs was primarily passed through to American consumers and companies. Downstream firms that use steel or inputs made of steel, which employ about 80 times more workers than the steel industry does, faced higher costs. One estimate found that Trump’s steel tariffs alone cost U.S. consumers and businesses about $900,000 for every job created or saved.

Getting rid of taxes on imported steel and aluminum would be a positive step for the economy.

But the real goal should be getting rid of all Trump’s taxes on global trade. Garrett Watson from the Tax Foundation recently shared estimates of how this would benefit the American economy.

…repealing the tariffs imposed under President Trump’s administration would be one of the simplest ways policymakers could boost economic growth. …About $460 billion worth of goods were subject to the tariffs, raising prices for consumers. In fact, we estimated the tariffs were about an $80 billion annual tax increase, reducing consumer purchasing power. …According to the Tax Foundation model, repealing tariffs imposed since 2018 would raise long-run GDP by 0.1 percent, long-run incomes (gross national product) by 0.2 percent, and create about 83,000 full-time equivalent jobs. This growth would boost after-tax incomes by about 0.3 percent for people across the income spectrum, helping low-income and middle-class taxpayers. …Repealing the tariffs would be a simple option to boost growth because it can be done without congressional authorization by President Biden, and would provide timely relief to businesses and households.

The last sentence is key. Trump had lots of unilateral authority to impose bad trade policy, and Biden has lots of unilateral authority to undo bad trade policy.

The fact that he hasn’t exercised that authority makes him just as guilty of anti-market trade policy as Trump.

The next thing to watch for is whether he continues Trump’s bad policy of sabotaging the World Trade Organization.

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Equality, Efficiency, and Trade

When I was first learning about economics in the 1970s and 1980s, Arthur Okun’s equality-efficiency tradeoff was part of just about any discussion of public policy.

Folks on the left acknowledged that their policies would lead to less prosperity, but they argued that result was acceptable because the benefits of a more-equal society would offset the cost of reduced economic output.

Needless to say, there were vigorous debates about how much additional equality could be achieved and how much economic damage might be caused by any particular policy, but few if any economists pretended that more government was actually good for growth.

Unfortunately, that has changed. A growing number of people on the left (especially those with tax-free jobs at international bureaucracies) now claim that bigger government actually is the way to get more growth.

Here’s their theory.

This illogical hypothesis is so absurd and so anti-empirical that I now get excited when I find economists who still use Okun’s framework when analyzing various reforms.

For instance, there is a new study from the European Central Bank that looks at whether a pro-growth policy (free trade) leads to less equality.

The working paper, authored by Roland Beck, Virginia Di Nino, and Livio Stracca, specifically measures the impact of membership in so-called “globalisation clubs.”

The mounting criticisms against globalisation…have sparked a lively debate about whether the narrative of the benefits of free trade and capital flows is still intact. …In this paper, we reconsider the effects of globalisation on income and inequality studying the consequences of quasi-natural experiments like accessions to “Globalisation Clubs”. …Our list of Globalisation Clubs includes the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which all require their members to pursue some form of either liberal trade or investment policies or a combination of both. …The main purpose of our study is to shed light on the hypothesis that globalisation leads to an efficiency-equity trade-off which is a fundamental concern in economics dating at least back to Okun (1975). In other words, is the hypothesis that globalisation increases economic efficiency to the detriment of cohesion and equality supported by the data?

Here are the key results.

The analysis leads to three main findings. First, with the exception of financial liberalisation we find that all our “globalisation shocks” lead to a significant increase in trade openness – a prerequisite for considering them globalisation shocks in the first place. Second, the effects on per capita income are mixed; positive for WTO accessions and trade openness shocks, insignificant for OECD accessions and even negative for EU accessions and financial liberalisations. …Finally, we find little evidence that globalisation shocks lead to more inequality. The Gini coefficients (market and net) tend not to change or even to fall, and the labour share of income to be unchanged or even rise, in the wake of a globalisation shock.Taken together, our results point to mostly positive effects for countries following globalisation shocks and challenge the view that globalisation is necessarily an efficiency-equity trade-off.

I’m not surprised by these findings.

There’s no reason to think that OECD membership will lead to better policy and there are good reasons to think EU membership might push policy in the wrong direction.

The WTO, by contrast, has a good track record of trade liberalization. So these results from the study make sense.

The primary takeaway from this research is that free trade is good for prosperity. Not only does it lead to more growth, but low-income people enjoy above-average gains.

Though I would argue that free trade would be just as desirable if rich people were the ones who enjoyed above-average gains. The key point is that all groups benefit when there are reforms to shrink the size and scope of government, and we shouldn’t get worked up if some people benefit more than others.

But there’s a secondary takeaway. This European Central Bank study also is an example of methodologically sound research (i.e., recognizing that more government is not a free lunch).

P.S. While I applaud the honesty of left-leaning economists who use Okun’s framework, that doesn’t stop me from criticizing some of their crazy conclusions.

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Lessons about Trump and Trade

Like President Reagan, I believe in free trade rather than protectionism.

So you won’t be surprised that I agree with the message in this video

To elaborate, one of the big lessons of the Trump era is that he undermined his good policies – such as tax reform – by imposing higher taxes on global trade.

Sadly, he didn’t realize that a “trade deficit” is largely an irrelevant statistic. Indeed, it’s merely the flip side of having a capital surplus.

To state the obvious, it’s not a bad thing when foreigners decide they want to invest in the United States economy. Heck, it’s a good thing, a sign of economic strength.

Professor Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth made the same point, and many additional points, in a column for the Wall Street Journal late last year.

After four years, what have we learned? Many things, but especially that old economic truths still have value: Tariffs don’t reduce the trade deficit. …Economists have long pointed out that the trade deficit is driven by macroeconomic factors, particularly international capital flows. …The merchandise trade deficit was $864 billion in 2019, more than $100 billion higher than in 2016. …Tariffs are paid by consumers, destroy jobs and hurt the economy. Mr. Trump insisted that China would pay for the 15% to 25% duties that he imposed on $300 billion of its exports. In fact, the tariffs were passed on to American consumers, who paid more… Take steel. Higher prices might have saved some jobs in the steel industry, but..steel protection is a job-destroying policy. Economists at the Federal Reserve found that the steel and aluminum tariffs reduced overall employment in manufacturing by 75,000 workers.

But destroying jobs was just one negative effect of protectionism.

We also got more corruption, as the Wall Street Journal opined.

…it’s time to point out one unsightly effect of the Trump tariffs: expanding the D.C. swamp. …As Mr. Trump’s tariffs began to bite, Congress sent hundreds of letters to the USTR, supporting specific tariff exclusions. …Rep. Steny Hoyer signed a letter, “on behalf of the Congressional Fire Services Caucus,” asking for an exclusion on smoke alarms. North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis sought one for Honda’s lawn mower flywheels. For Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, it was BedJet’s “ultra-thin adjustable bed ‘device.’” For Congressman Doug Collins, Home Depot’s light fixtures. For Sen. Patty Murray, empty coffee K-cup pods. Some of these exclusions were granted, and many weren’t. It’s difficult to know if lobbying by Congress made a difference… One substantial downside is more political interference in the economy. Pretty swampy.

We saw something very similar when President Obama was granting waivers for Obamacare. That was just one of the ways insiders got rich lobbying politicians for special treatment under government-run healthcare.

Let’s wrap this up.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal in March, Senator Pat Toomey and former Senator Phil Gramm conclude Trump’s protectionism was a failure.

In his first two years as president, Mr. Trump lifted regulatory burdens and pushed through a major tax cut, which triggered a broad-based rise in income and employment. He then turned to his protectionist agenda, which reduced economic growth and failed to deliver Michigan, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin in the 2020 election. Protectionism failed both as economic policy and political strategy. …As Mr. Trump found when he imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum, the resulting increase in jobs in those industries was small. …Jobs gained in the steel and aluminum industries after the tariffs were dwarfed by jobs lost in industries that use steel and aluminum in their manufacturing process, not to mention the jobs lost due to foreign trade retaliation. …Innovation, technological development and the capacity of a market economy to adapt to change provide our only sure path to job creation and prosperity. This is a lesson all politicians, but especially Republicans, need to learn from the economic and political failure of protectionism in the Trump era.

Amen.

Protectionism didn’t work. It didn’t create jobs, and it didn’t even buy votes.

Which is why I hope this meme is the lesson that people remember from the Trump years (also the message we should have learned from the Hoover years).

The bottom line is that “Tariff Man” hurt himself and hurt the economy.

P.S. Sadly, Biden has not reversed many of Trump’s protectionist policies. But that’s not a surprise given his support for statism.

P.P.S. Though I hold out some hope that Biden will utilize the World Trade Organization as a tool to expand trade, thus reversing one of Trump’s mistakes.

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Ranking Presidents: Trump’s Mixed Economic Record

Since both political parties have sent good and bad people to the White House, I don’t think it makes much sense to compare all Democratic presidents vs all Republican presidents.

But we can learn a lot by looking at the track record of specific presidents. I’ve done that with several past chief executives (Wilson, Hoover, FDR, Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama), and today we’re going to assess Trump’s performance.

The bottom line, as you can see from the chart, is that he did really well in some areas and really poorly in other areas, so his overall record was flat. Or perhaps slightly negative.

The bottom line is that Trump was good on taxes and bad on spending and trade.

And there were some very positive moves on regulation, but they were partly offset by areas where Trump increased intervention (coal subsidies, property rights, Fannie/Freddie, and international tax rules, for instance).

By the way, I’d like to give Trump a negative grade for his failure to address entitlements, but, in the interest of fairness, I only include actual policy changes.

Having given my big-picture assessment, here are some columns and articles that offer interesting insights.

We’ll start with some pro-Trump analysis. Professor Casey Mulligan opined in the Wall Street Journal that he restored growth (until the coronavirus, of course).

The Obama administration promulgated hundreds of new federal regulations that protected certain special interests from market competition. The beneficiaries included large banks, trial lawyers, big tech, major health-insurance companies, labor unions and foreign drug manufacturers. President Trump promised to undo all that, and in many cases succeeded, sometimes with the help of a Republican Congress. …Mr. Trump also helped remove government obstacles to innovation and competition in health care. Democrats will tell you that the first calendar-year drop in retail prescription drug prices in 46 years was mere coincidence, not the result of deregulation. …The Fed and the Obama economic team overpredicted growth almost every year from 2010-16. When growth failed to meet their rosy predictions, Mr. Obama’s advisers blamed the poor economic performance on America itself. …No one in Washington predicted that small business optimism would skyrocket to record levels when Mr. Trump was elected, that real wages would grow again (especially for blue-collar workers), that business formation would hit 20th-century highs, or that poverty and unemployment rates would quickly fall to record lows for Hispanics and African-Americans.  …Although Mr. Trump’s economic policy was imperfect, it was preferable by a long shot to Mr. Obama’s, which punished work, hiring and success rather than rewarding them. 

And here’s a chart that definitely makes Trump look good compared to Obama.

Those numbers will look much worse once 2020 numbers are included, but I won’t blame Trump for coronavirus-caused economic havoc (though I also don’t give him full credit for the good data in 2019).

Now let’s look at some less-than-flattering analysis.

Jeffrey Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research lists some of Trump’s statist policies.

From 2015, even from his first public speeches following his presidential run, it was clear that Donald Trump was not a conservative in the Reagan tradition… This is not an American ideal. It’s not about freedom, rights, the rule of law, much less the limits on government. …Trump’s first year began with a more traditional Republican agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, and non-progressive court appointments. …That all changed on January 22, 2018. …This was the beginning of the trade war that would expand to Europe, Canada, Mexico, most of Asia, and ultimately the entire world. …What he ended up seeking was nothing short of trade autarky. …In addition to this calamity, US government spending soared 47% while the money supply registered record increases as measured by M1. The effects of this debt and money printing will be felt through next year.

Rick Newman wrote for Yahoo that Trump’s fiscal performance makes him an honorary Democrat.

Trump’s last-second objection to the $900 billion coronavirus relief bill Congress approved after eight months of negotiation is an unexpected Christmas gift for Democrats. Trump says the $600 direct payment to most Americans contained in the bill is too small. He wants $2,000. Trump could have insisted on this while Congress was drafting the bill… Democrats are gleeful. They’d happily accept a supersized stimulus payment, and even better, they now get to watch Republicans battle each other as they try to figure out what to do about Trump. Some Congressional Republicans think $2,000 is too generous, and there’s no chance of that getting into the bill unless other provisions come out. 

Newman was focusing on Trump’s spending proclivities during the pandemic, but the assertion that “maybe Trump’s a Democrat” applies to his fiscal record during his first three years as well.

P.S. I didn’t rank Trump on monetary policy for the same reason I didn’t rank Obama on that issue. Simply stated, I think both of them pursued a misguided Keynesian approach of easy money and artificially low interest rates, but we don’t have firm evidence (yet) of negative consequences.

P.P.S. I also didn’t give Trump a grade, positive or negative, regarding coronavirus. The federal government failed, but those failures largely were independent of the White House.

P.P.P.S. I generally approved of Trump’s judicial appointments, but don’t includes judges in my assessments of economic policy (though I may have to change my mind if they restore the Constitution’s protections of economic liberty and limits on the power of Washington).

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Hopes and Fears for 2021

Yesterday was my review of the best and worst policy developments in 2020.

Today, I’ll share my hopes and fears for 2021.

These are not predictions (economists have a terrible track record when try to make forecasts). Instead, these are merely good and bad things that might plausibly happen.

We’ll start with the positives.

Gridlock – I don’t necessarily think Biden is a hard-core leftist, but his fiscal agenda is terrible. I want him to have an excuse to put those policies on the back burner, and that will happen if Republicans control the Senate and we have “gridlock.” Simply stated, I’d rather nothing happen in Washington than have bad things happen. By the way, I’ll openly admit to being a hypocrite on this issue. At some point, I hope there will be a White House and a Congress that want to reform the tax code and fix entitlements. When that happens, I won’t want any obstacles.

Supreme Court tosses civil asset forfeiture – I’m recycling this item from last year because I’m hopeful that it’s just a matter of time before the Justices toss out this wretched policy that literally allows government to steal property from people who have not been convicted of any crime, or even charged with any wrongdoing.

Trade liberalization – To be charitable, Trump was a disaster on trade. Biden almost certainly will move policy in the right direction, including a restoration of the World Trade Organization‘s ability to settle disputes.

I used to list the collapse of Venezuela’s totalitarian government as one of my annual hopes and I still think that will happen, hopefully sooner rather than later. That being said, I’m getting a superstitious feeling that I’m jinxing regime change since I’ve listed that hope the past three years and it hasn’t happened.

Now let’s look at the negatives.

Absence of gridlock, leading to big anti-growth tax increases – If Democrats win both Senate seats in Georgia in a few days, that will give them control of the Senate, which will dramatically increase the danger that Biden will push his class-warfare tax policies.

Re-regulation – Trump did not have a perfect track record on red tape (coal subsidies, property rights, Fannie/Freddie, for instance), but there was a net shift in the right direction during his four years. Biden almost certainly will impose more intervention. Indeed, I’m not aware of a single regulatory issue where he’s on the right side. So don’t get your hopes up for better showerheads and dishwashers.

Kamala Harris becomes president – The Vice President-Elect staked out policies far to the left of Biden when she ran for president. And she has a reprehensible track record of trampling rights when she was California’s top cop. That’s an unsavory combination. If she’s even half as bad as her rhetoric, we all should wish Biden good health for the next four years.

P.S. If you want to see hope and fears for previous years, here are my thoughts for 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

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Protectionism vs. Prosperity

In early 2019, I released this video summarizing some of the evidence for free trade.

The bad news is that I must not be very persuasive. Trump continued with protectionist policy.

The good news is that we now have more evidence against that form of government intervention.

But first, I’m going to start with a bit of theory. Here’s a chart from the Council of Foreign Relations showing the relationship between prosperity and trade balances.

And here’s the explanation, courtesy of Benn Steil and Benjamin Della Rocca.

President Trump says that America running a trade deficit means that “jobs and wealth are being given to other countries.” …this statement is logically and historically false. The left-hand figure above shows that the relationship between trade deficits and growth in the United States, going back nearly 30 years, is the opposite. Rising growth tends to increase imports through higher consumption. The imports have not meant that “jobs and wealth are being given to other countries”: they have been a sign of a strong U.S. economy.

This is spot on. As I explained in my video on the trade deficit, people in richer, faster-growing countries can afford to buy more goods and services (regardless of where they are produced) than people in countries with anemic economic performance.

Indeed, this is why (at least in the pre-coronavirus era) America’s trade deficit was expanding.

Now let’s shift to the additional evidence that has accumulated since the video was produced.

Here’s are the key findings from a study by Kyle Handley, Fariha Kamal, and Ryan Monarch, which was just published by the Federal Reserve.

Using 2016 confidential firm-trade linked data, we document the implied incidence and scope of new import tariffs. Firms that eventually faced tariff increases on their imports ac-counted for 84% of all exports and they represent 65% of manufacturing employment. For all affected firms, the implied cost is $900 per worker in new duties. To estimate the effect on U.S. export growth, we construct product-level measures of import tariff exposure of U.S. exports from the underlying firm micro data.More exposed products experienced 2 percentage point lower growth relative to products with no exposure. The decline in exports is equivalent to an ad valorem tariff on U.S. exports of almost 2% for the typical product and almost 4% for products with higher than average exposure.

Here are some results of a recent study by Stephen J. Redding, Mary Amiti, and David Weinstein.

Using data from 2018, a number of studies have found that recent U.S tariffs have been passed on entirely to U.S. importers and consumers. …Using another year of data including significant escalations in the trade war, we find that U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers. We show that the response of import values to the tariffs increases in absolute magnitude over time, consistent with the idea that it takes time for firms to reorganize supply chains.

Here’s a chart from the study showing how Trump basically tripled average trade taxes over the past couple of years.

Next we have a 2019 study authored by Davide Furceri, Swarnali A. Hannan, Jonathan D. Ostry, and Andrew K. Rose.

We estimate impulse response functions from local projections using a panel of annual data that spans 151 countries over 1963‐2014. Tariffs increases are associated with persistent economically and statistically significant declines in domestic output and productivity, as well as higher unemployment and inequality, real exchange rate appreciation and insignificant changes to the trade balance. Output and productivity impacts are magnified when tariffs rise during expansions and when they are imposed by advanced (as opposed to developing) economies; effects are asymmetric, being larger when tariffs go up than when they fall. Results are robust to a large number of perturbations to our methodology, and hold using both macroeconomic and industry‐level data.

These charts from their study paint a damning picture.

The bottom line is that Trump’s trade policies are hurting the U.S. economy (just like China’s protectionist policies are hurting that nation’s economy).

P.S. A great mystery is how some analysts understand that it’s bad to have higher taxes on trade, yet also think it’s perfectly okay to impose even bigger tax increases on work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship. The folks at the International Monetary Fund are very guilty of this type of fiscal hypocrisy.

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The WTO Should Be Preserved, but Bilateral Free-Trade Pacts Are the Way Forward for Future Liberalization

Last year, I released this video to help explain why the World Trade Organization has been a good deal for the United States.

My argument was – and still is – very straightforward, and it’s based on two simple propositions.

1. Free trade is good because societies are more prosperous with free markets and open competition.
2. The WTO has helped nations move in that direction by reducing import taxes and other trade barriers.

This outcome is particularly beneficial for the United States since other countries tend to be more protectionist.

But not everyone agrees with this position.

President Trump is a notorious critic of the WTO, for instance, which isn’t surprising since he doesn’t understand trade.

There are also plenty of opponents on the left, which also isn’t surprising since they don’t like capitalism and competition.

What is somewhat surprising, however, is that some Republican lawmakers also have decided to oppose the WTO.

In a column last week for the New York Times, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri actually argued that it’s time to get rid of the World Trade Organization. Here’s his argument against the Geneva-based body.

The global economic system as we know it is a relic; it requires reform, top to bottom. We should begin with one of its leading institutions, the World Trade Organization. We should abolish it. …Its mandate was to promote free trade, but the organization instead allowed some nations to maintain trade barriers and protectionist workarounds, like China, while preventing others from defending themselves, like the United States. …Meanwhile, the W.T.O. required American workers to compete against Chinese forced labor but did next to nothing to stop Chinese theft of American intellectual property and products. …too many jobs left America’s borders for elsewhere. As factories closed, workers suffered, from small towns to the urban core. …Enough is enough. The W.T.O. should be abolished, and along with it, the new model global economy. The quest to turn the world into a liberal order of democracies was always misguided.

And here’s what he wants as a replacement.

The only sure way to confront the single greatest threat to American security in the 21st century, Chinese imperialism, is to rebuild the U.S. economy and to build up the American worker. And that means reforming the global economic system. …The United States must seek new arrangements and new rules, in concert with other free nations, to restore America’s economic sovereignty and allow this country to practice again the capitalism that made it strong. …For nearly 50 years before the W.T.O.’s founding, the United States and its allies maintained a network of reciprocal trade that protected our national interests and the nation’s workers. We can do it again …It means striking trade deals that are truly mutual and truly beneficial for America and walking away when they are not. It means building a new network of trusted friends and partners to resist Chinese economic imperialism.

Since Hawley doesn’t seem to appreciate the benefits of trade, the simple approach would be to criticize him for wanting politicians and bureaucrats to have the power to interfere with voluntary exchange across borders.

Such criticism is warranted, of course, but I want to take this opportunity to make four points about how there may be hope for the future.

1. Hawley is actually endorsing the status quo. After World War II, the US took the lead in creating the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT), a multilateral system of agreements which produced successive rounds of trade liberalization. The US then took the lead in creating the WTO so there would be a system (dispute resolution) to encourage nations to comply with their GATT commitments. But the dispute resolution process is now toothless because there are no longer enough judges for the system to operate (Trump has blocked the appointment of new judges). For all intents and purposes, the world is now operating under the pre-WTO rules – which seems to be what Hawley is calling for in his column.

2. The WTO no longer is a vehicle for global trade liberalization. The WTO is a consensus-based organization, which means unanimity is required for additional GATT-style reductions in global trade barriers. But since membership has expanded to include a number of countries with a protectionist mindset (most notably India, but China and Brazil also are a problem), it’s extremely unlikely that we’ll ever see another multilateral agreement for additional tariff reductions. This doesn’t change the fact that GATT was a big past success, and it doesn’t change the fact that it would be nice if the WTO’s dispute-resolution mechanism was back in operation. It simply means that we won’t be able to build on that progress.

3. Hawley is also endorsing, practically speaking, the best path forward. Another round of multilateral trade liberalization is off the table, but that doesn’t prevent nations from moving forward with bilateral free-trade agreements (FTAs are consistent with WTO rules). Interestingly, Hawley seems to support that approach. The U.S. already has nearly 20 of these pacts and is engaged in major negotiations with the United Kingdom for a new FTA that hopefully will be a template for future FTAs with other market-friendly nations.

4. Beware of the regulatory-harmonization wolf in FTA clothes. While bilateral trade pacts are desirable, it’s important to pay attention to the fine print. The European Union wants to hijack FTAs and make them vehicles for regulatory harmonization (meaning other nations have to agree to the EU’s onerous approach to red tape). If the goal is to have more trade, more competition, and more dynamism, the United States and other pro-market countries should make “mutual recognition” the foundation of future free-trade pacts.

The bottom line is that Hawley is wrong about the WTO, but he may actually be right about the best way of achieving future trade liberalization. Assuming, of course, that he actually means what he wrote about striking new deals.

In an ideal world, needless to say, these new bilateral FTAs (or even multi-nation FTAs) should be in addition to the WTO.

P.S. An under-appreciated aspect of the WTO is that it gives nations like the US a more-effective way of pressuring China to eliminate subsidies and other trade-distorting practices.

P.P.S. I’m normally very skeptical of international organizations. But the WTO encourages globalization rather than global governance, a key distinction.

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A Lesson about Economic Performance and Trade Balances

One year ago, I shared this video to explain why a “trade deficit” doesn’t matter, in large part because it is simply a result of foreigners wanting to invest in America’s economy with some of the dollars they earn.

We also have a trade deficit, I pointed out, because we’re richer than most other nations. Simply stated, we can afford to buy more from people in other nations than they can afford to buy from us.

Indeed, I pointed out that the trade deficit increased in Trump’s first few years in office because better tax policy and better regulatory policy increased America’s economic performance relative to other countries.

This is why, as a general rule, it’s actually a sign of economic strength to have a so-called trade deficit.

The flip side of this observation is that trade deficits will decline if the economy is weak.

And that seems to be happening today. Christine McDaniel of the Mercatus Center, writing for the Hill, notes that the trade deficit is now falling for that unfortunate reason.

The Trump administration’s dream of reducing the trade deficit is finally coming true. …for the first two months of 2020, the U.S. trade deficit dropped to $113.5 billion. That’s down from $130.4 billion over the same period last year, a 13 percent decrease. …Needless to say, …we import less. Today, we are importing less because Americans are consuming less during an economic shut down. …We are probably on track to shrink the trade deficit even more this year. …Consumer confidence declined sharply in March, which reflects consumer sentiment — that is, their overall desire to go out and buy things, including imports. …The irony is that the pandemic is fulfilling one of his campaign promises. Nobody is treating it like good news — but this dream coming true just highlights why the metric is so flawed.

To emphasize Ms. McDaniel’s point, let’s look at the long-run data on America’s trade balance.

Here are the annual numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, measured as a share of economic output.

As you can see, our last trade surplus was during the 1970s, when America was suffering from stagflation, and the trade deficit since then has always declined when there’s been a recession.

By the way, you can also see how the trade deficit increased during the Reagan years and the Clinton years. The obvious lesson is that pro-market policies make us richer, and that means we buy more and attract more investment.

That’s good outcome, even if the so-called trade deficit climbs.

The bottom line is that if we want to reduce our trade deficit (and also, by definition, reduce our capital surplus), we should adopt the Bernie Sanders agenda. We won’t be rich enough to buy much from foreigners, and people in other nations won’t be so willing to invest in America’s economy.

Maybe I’m crazy, but that seems like a bad outcome.

P.S. Trade balances also can be affected by other factors, such as shifts in monetary policy and the economic performance of major trading partners.

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Trump and the Politics of Coronavirus

Notwithstanding dalliances in other fields, I’m a policy wonk.

But I will pontificate (often incorrectly) on politics when asked, which is what happened in this interview about the electoral impact of the coronavirus.

My basic point is that Trump is much better than the average Republican about “controlling the narrative.”

In other words, he doesn’t allow the media to frame issues in a way that is adverse to his interests.

Given Trump’s Jekyll-Hyde approach to economic policy, I have mixed feelings about his Jedi-like ability.

But I will point out why narratives are so important in public policy.

• History books are filled with inaccurate and nonsensical stories about the Great Depression being caused by capitalism and being cured by FDR’s New Deal. In reality, statism deserves the blame. Bad policy by Hoover helped start the Depression and bad policy by FDR helped extend the Depression.
• More recently, people have been subjected to an erroneous story that capitalism and greed caused the 2008 financial crisis. As I mentioned in the interview, that’s grotesquely inaccurate. The crisis was caused by easy-money policy by the Federal Reserve and misguided subsidies from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Since I’ve shifted to my comfort zone of public policy, I’ll also say something about trade.

One of the big risks from the coronavirus is that it will weaken global trade. Which led me to mention in the interview that hopefully Trump might learn from this growing crisis that expanded trade is good for prosperity.

Though I admit I’m not very optimistic given his mercantilist perspective.

P.S. Textbook discussions of “robber barons” and “sweatshops” are other examples of how bad narratives lead to distorted history.

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Because Trump’s Winning on the Economy, He’s “Losing” on the Trade Deficit

Early last year, I shared a video explaining that trade deficits generally don’t matter. I even suggested trade deficits might be a sign of economic strength because foreigners who earned dollars were anxious to invest them in the American economy.

I’m recycling this video to make a point about trade and the economy for both Trump supporters and Trump critics.

For Trump supporters, I want them to understand that the trade deficit has increased under his policies. The data from the latest Commerce Department report show that the yearly trade deficit has increased from about $500 billion at the end of the Obama years to a bit over $600 billion during the Trump years.

And the reason I’m making this point is that I want Trump supporters to realize that they shouldn’t be upset about trade balances. Indeed, they should be happy because there’s a strong argument that the trade deficit is increasing in large part because Trump’s pro-growth tax reform and regulatory reform and making America more attractive for foreign investors.

For Trump critics, I want them to understand the same point, though from a different perspective. Many of them have been (correctly) critical of Trump’s protectionism. And they’ve been happy to point out that his taxes on foreign goods haven’t reduced the trade deficit.

But I would like them to contemplate why the economy has continued to grow. Hopefully, they will realize that pro-market policies in other areas are offsetting the damage of protectionism and therefore be more supportive of capitalism.

The Wall Street Journal opined on this topic last year.

President Trump can take a bow that his tax reform and deregulation are working as intended. …The trade deficit grew… This is not bad economic news. Imports grew faster than exports as the U.S. economy accelerated and much of the world slowed. The dollar grew stronger as capital flowed into the U.S., and the trade deficit grew to offset the larger capital inflows as it must by definition under the national income accounts. …a larger trade deficit is a benign byproduct of a healthier American economy. Supply-side policies revived animal spirits and gave the economy a second wind. …The best way to respond to a trade deficit is to ignore it.

From a left-of-center perspective, Fareed Zakaria made the same point in a recent column for the Washington Post.

Trump campaigned relentlessly on the notion that America’s economy was being ruined by large trade deficits. …He promised on the campaign trail in June 2016, “You will see a drop like you’ve never seen before.”In reality, the trade deficit has risen substantially under Trump. …when the United States has grown robustly, its trade deficit has tended to rise. If you want to achieve a sharp decline in the trade deficit, it’s easy — just trigger a recession. …while the United States has a deficit in manufactured goods with the rest of the world, it runs a huge surplus in services (banking, insurance, consulting, etc.). …The United States is also the world’s favorite destination to invest capital, by a large margin. As Martin points out, when you look at this entire picture, “the trade deficit should be something to brag about rather than denounce.” …Trump’s trade policy has been an enormously costly exercise, forcing Americans to pay tens of billions in taxes on imported goods, then using tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to compensate farmers for lost income (because of retaliatory tariffs)… All to solve a problem that isn’t really a problem.

Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center, writing for Reason, summarizes the issue.

President Donald Trump hates the trade deficit. …If elected, he promised, he would “end our chronic trade deficits.” …free traders…explained, a country’s trade balance is determined overwhelmingly by factors such as the U.S dollar serving as a reserve currency, the ratio of savings to investment opportunities at home and abroad, and the relative attractiveness of that country’s investment climate. As long as the United States is growing and remains an attractive place to invest, we Americans will continue to run trade deficits with the rest of the world. …They want these dollars, in part, to buy American exports. …More important, and often overlooked: Foreigners want dollars also to invest in America’s powerful economy. …the current-account deficit is a mirror image of the capital-account surplus. This is why Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute describes imports as “job-generating foreign investment surpluses for a better America.” It is thus no surprise that as the American economy grew, the trade deficit also grew.

I’ll close with a chart that’s in the video because it reinforces the three columns cited above.

As you can see, the link between the trade deficit and an investment surplus isn’t just a theoretical construct. It’s an accounting identity.

The bottom line is that people on both sides of the political debate should ignore the trade deficit and instead focus on the tried-and-true recipe for generating prosperity.

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Trump’s Protectionism Has Backfired on America’s Workers

At the beginning of the Trump era, many of us (including me) warned that his statements on trade were nonsensical.

And when Trump shifted from bad rhetoric to bad policy, Johan Norberg pointed out why trade wars are very misguided.

As you might expect, Johan is correct. More government intervention in global commerce has led to bad consequences.

Trump’s tax increases on trade have produced bad results for the American economy. Consumers have been hurt, businesses have been hurt, exporters have been hurt, and specific sectors such as farming and manufacturing have been hurt.

All of this was very predictable.

Indeed, the Trump Administration’s own economists warned back in 2018 that a trade war would backfire. Here are some excerpts from a report in the New York Times.

A White House economic analysis of President Trump’s trade agenda has concluded that Mr. Trump’s tariffs will hurt economic growth in the United States… The findings from the White House Council of Economic Advisers have been circulated only internally and not publicly released… The administration has hit Canada, Mexico, Japan and the European Union with steel and aluminum tariffs and…tariffs on a range of Chinese goods. In return, many of those countries have either imposed or threatened reciprocal tariffs on everything from steel to pork to orange juice, a move that economists say will depress economic growth. …many economists have been warning that the administration’s trade approach will undercut economic growth and partially offset any boost from the $1.5 trillion tax cut that Congress passed and Mr. Trump signed… Wall Street research firms have warned that those tariffs, and the retaliatory tariffs that trading partners have threatened in response, will slow growth in the United States. …In a…survey of an expert panel of academic economists assembled by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, no economist agreed with the statement, “Imposing new U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum will improve Americans’ welfare.”

Needless to say, Trump ignored the good advice from his economists and imposed a bunch of tax increases on trade.

We now have some hard evidence about the wisdom of this approach. Economists at the Federal Reserve crunched the numbers as part of a new study.

While there are already vast theoretical and empirical literatures documenting the effects of changes in trade policy, …there are virtually no modern episodes of a large, advanced economy raising tariffs in a way comparable to the U.S. in 2018-2019. …these tariffs…were imposed, in part, to boost the U.S. manufacturing sector by protecting against what were deemed to be the unfair trade practices of trading partners, principally China. …This paper provides the first comprehensive estimates of the effect of recent tariffs on the U.S. manufacturing sector. …We measure the import protection channel as the share of domestic absorption affected by newly imposed tariffs. We account for declines in competitiveness associated with increased input costs as the share of industry costs subject to new tariffs.Finally, we measure an industry’s potential exposure to retaliatory tariffs by U.S. trading partners as the share of industry-level exports subject to new retaliatory tariffs. …We then relate the measures for these three channels of tariff exposure to monthly data on manufacturing employment, output, and producer prices.

And what did the experts find?

We find that tariff increases enacted in 2018 are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices. In terms of manufacturing employment, rising input costs and retaliatory tariffs each contribute to the negative relationship, and the contribution from these channels more than offsets a small positive effect from import protection. For producer prices, the relative increases associated with tariffs are due solely to the rising input cost channel. …we find that shifting an industry from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile in terms of exposure to each of these channels of tariffs is associated with a reduction in manufacturing employment of 1.4 percent, with the positive contribution from the import protection effects of tariffs (0.3 percent) more than offset by the negative effects associated with rising input costs (-1.1 percent) and retaliatory tariffs(-0.7 percent).

In other words, the small benefits that go to the industries that are sheltered from competition are very much outweighed by the damage to other sectors of the economy (a lesson that Trump could have learned if he studied real-world evidences, such as the Great Depression).

The Wall Street Journal opined about the Fed’s study.

One mystery of the Trump -era economy has been why U.S. manufacturing slumped sharply in late 2018 and 2019 after surging the year before. The Occam’s razor culprit is the onset of trade war… Federal Reserve economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce examine the impact of the tariff outbursts of 2018 on U.S. manufacturing employment, output and prices. This is important work because 2018 marked the start in earnest of President Trump’s campaign to change the world trading order, using tariffs as his preferred bludgeon. …Mr. Trump justified his campaign in part as a way to revive American manufacturing while protecting against unfair trade practices. So how has that worked out? …the economists have bad news for tariff lovers. …the higher costs from tariffs swamped benefits to specific firms from import protection. The tariffs cost more jobs than they created. …As the Fed economists conclude, “We find the impact” from protection “is completely offset in the short-run by reduced competitiveness from retaliation and higher costs in downstream industries.” ….A previous Fed study looked at uncertainty and found it has cut U.S. GDP growth by about a percentage point, which explains the deceleration to 2% from 3% in the last year.

At the risk of sounding like a dogmatic libertarian, we now have additional confirmation that it’s not a good idea to expand the footprint of government.

That’s true about taxes. That’s true about spending. That’s true about regulation. And it’s true about trade.

P.S. Wonky readers may be interested in this chart from the Fed study, which shows the impact of Trump’s trade war on employment, production, and producer prices.

P.P.S. Trump is right when he asserts that other nations have bad protectionist policies. Unfortunately, he wrongly thinks that reducing trade deficits somehow will address those bad policies. Instead, he should have targeted the specific bad policies (such as Chinese cronyism), ideally by utilizing the World Trade Organization.

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Hopes and Fears for 2020

Yesterday’s column was my annual end-of-year round-up of the best and worst developments of the concluding year.

Today I’ll be forward looking and give you my hopes and fears for the new year, which is a newer tradition that began in 2017 (and continued in 2018 and 2019).

With my glass-half-full outlook, we’ll start with the things I hope will happen.

Supreme Court strikes down civil asset forfeiture – It is nauseating that bureaucrats can steal property from citizens who have never been convicted of a crime. Or even charged with a crime. Fortunately, this disgusting practice already has attracted attention from Clarence Thomas and other sound-thinking Justices on the Supreme Court. Hopefully, this will produce a decision that ends this example of Venezuela-style government thuggery.

Good free-trade agreements for the United Kingdom – This is a two-pronged hope. First, I want a great agreement between the U.S. and the U.K., based on the principle of mutual recognition. Second, I want the best-possible agreement between the U.K. and the E.U., which will be a challenge since the political elite in Brussels has a spiteful desire to “punish” the British people for supporting Brexit.

Maduro’s ouster in Venezuela – I already wished for this development in 2018 and 2019, so this is my “Groundhog Day” addition to the list. But if I keep wishing for it, sooner or later it will happen and I’ll look prescient. But I actually don’t care about whether my predictions are correct, I just want an end to the horrible suffering for the people of Venezuela.

Here are the things I fear will happen in 2020.

A bubble bursts – I hope I’m wrong (and that may be the case since I’ve been fretting about it for a long time), but I fear that financial markets are being goosed by an easy-money policy from the Federal Reserve. Bubbles feel good when they’re expanding, but last decade should have taught us that they can be very painful when they pop.

A loss of economic liberty in Chile and/or Hong Kong – As shown by Economic Freedom of the World, there are not that many success stories in the world. But we can celebrate what’s happened in Hong Kong since WWII and what’s happened in Chile since the late 1970s. Economic liberty has dramatically boosted prosperity. Unfortunately, Hong Kong’s liberty is now being threatened from without and Chile’s liberty is now being threatened from within.

Repeal of the Illinois flat tax – The best approach for a state is to have no income tax, and a state flat tax is the second-best approach. Illinois is in that second category thanks to a long-standing provision of the state’s constitution. Needless to say, this irks the big spenders who control the Illinois government and they are asking voters this upcoming November to vote on whether to bust the flat tax and open the floodgates for an ever-growing fiscal burden. By the way, it’s quite likely that I’ll be including the Massachusetts flat tax on this list next year.

I’ll also add a special category for something that would be both good and bad.

Trump gets reelected – Because Trump is producing better tax policy and better regulatory policy, and because of my hopes for judges who believe in the Constitution’s protections of economic liberty, it would be good if he won a second term.

Trump gets reelected – Because Trump is producing worse spending policy and worse trade policy, and because of my concerns never-ending Keynesian monetary policy from the Federal Reserve, it would be bad if he won a second term.

Happy New Year, everyone.

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