Everyone’s talking about tariffs . . . but do we really know what they are, how they work, what their purpose is?
Listen in:
Scott and Bob give backgrounder on tariffs from a historical perspective (we’re not economists) and discuss the reason they are used in global economic relationships and describe some of the reasons that American founders advocated for them (hint, it’s not about revenues–it’s for capitalist development of industry). We also discuss the political meaning of the tariff–they’re part of a dispute over trade policy between northern manufacturing and southern agriculture (the so-called Tariff of Abominations) from the early 19th century through the McKinley Tariff years. Then we described the advent of the Free Trade era and how tariffs became less important (a federal income tax replaced tariffs as a main source of revenue as the U.S. grew into an economic power–tariff revenues weren’t adequate for the needs of a growing imperial power by the early 20th century–and how that began to shift after World War II. And we finished up by briefly discussing how ill-developed and damaging Trump’s tariffs will be.
