Trump took the opposite view Wednesday, telling Americans that if only Congress had stuck to tariffs, the Great Depression “would have been a much different story.”
That Trump should need to goose up the facts to re-educate the population maybe shouldn’t be surprising from the leader of a movement built on a backward-looking promise to make the country “great again.”
“We have a 20th century president in a 21st century economy who wants to take us back to the 19th century,” wrote Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth economics professor, on X.
Irwin is the author of multiple books, including “Clashing over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy.” We talked last year, when he gave me a crash course in US tariff history that bore almost no resemblance to what Trump told Americans on Wednesday.
Here’s a look at how Trump described history, with some added context.
“From 1789 to 1913, we were a tariff-backed nation, and the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been.”
Trump
Trump didn’t say what he meant by “proportionately the wealthiest,” but by any standard definition of the word wealth, he’s not on solid ground.
By the numbers, the US today is an extremely wealth country, as former Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican, explained on Fox Business as he trashed Trump’s tariff plan.
“For all this discussion about how badly we’ve been abused and ripped off and how terrible it’s been, well, we’re the world’s biggest economy with four percent of the world’s population,” Toomey said. “We have 25 percent of the world’s economic output. We are the biggest agricultural exporter in the world. We – our manufacturing, domestic manufacturing is at an all-time high. We’re doing it with fewer workers, mostly because automation has allowed us to do it much more productively.”
Americans are wealthy in terms of a standard of living. Most people today have indoor toilets, air conditioning, access to modern grocery stores, vaccines and carry a super computer around in their pocket. Back then, pretty much nobody had any of those things.
There was no Medicare of Social Security, so older people were left to fend for themselves at a level modern Americans would not understand.
“In the 1880s, they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting. We were collecting so much money so fast, we didn’t know what to do with it. Isn’t that a nice problem to have?”
Trump
It’s not clear what commission Trump is referring to. A tariff commission in 1883 under President Chester A. Arthur recommended lowering tariffs, but was ignored by Congress. The Constitution puts Congress in charge of tariffs, but lawmakers have, over the years, handed much of this authority to the president.
Surpluses of the 1880s probably had more to do with the government being much smaller. Things like Medicare and Social Security, the biggest drain on US tax dollars today, did not exist and the US military, the largest recipient of discretionary funding, was a fraction of what it is today.
Trump has also lionized President William McKinley, who before he was president pushed for the McKinley Tariff, by which Congress raised tariffs in the 1890s. Voters perceived the tariff as benefiting the wealthy and Republicans subsequently lost the House in one of the biggest power swings in US history.
The Stanford professor emeritus Richard White told me in a Q&A about the Gilded Age that there are structural differences between the country in the 19th Century and the country today that make these comparisons extremely difficult to make.
“One of the things McKinley was trying to do, and the Republicans were trying to do, was to raise the tariff in order to reduce the federal deficit by making the tariffs so high, it would take down tax revenue because they really were worried about the deflation that was coming with the Gold Standard,” White said.
“Now we’re in a very different situation, because now we have great deficits and the idea that the tariff is going to bring in revenue is really not something that’s going to happen,” White added.
In the 1880s, the US was rapidly industrializing and many other countries, which are industrializing today, were not yet on that path.
“Then in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government.”
Trump
The reasons for the income tax are pretty simple. Congress tried to establish an income tax earlier in a bill where it tried to lower tariffs, according to the National Archives. But the Supreme Court struck the income tax down. Earlier in US history, an income tax had been temporarily enacted to pay for the Civil War. Enacting a Constitutional Amendment requires the assent of three quarters of states, so this was the will of the majority at the time.
Trump frequently says foreign countries pay tariffs. It’s not true. US importers pay them, but really US consumers and businesses end up footing the bill.
“Then in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy. It would have been a much different story.”
Trump
He must be referring here to the aforementioned Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed not long after the 1929 stock market crash, according to the National Archives, which notes that historians debate what role the Smoot-Hawley tariff, or already in-place tariffs played in causing or deepening the Great Depression.
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