In the 2010s, as I saw how interdependent consumers in the economically advanced US and other nations were on goods shipped from China and elsewhere, I realized the US could only get its middle and lower classes back to New Deal type success levels would be through (a) significant increases in the MARGINAL income and capital gains tax rates on the truly rich and corporations and (b) a massive infrastructure program to rebuild our infrastructure, hopefully with greener technologies (yeah, I supported a New Deal that was Green before AOC).
Also, as I saw the US birth rate was dropping so much, any massive infrastructure program would invariably lead to us putting up "Help Wanted" signs at the physical land borders and sea/air ports. That's a little hint why Trump 1.0 never came through on infrastructure: It would expose that our nation didn't have enough even trainable people to do the infrastructure work. We would also have too many infrastructure jobs chasing too few workers, and that would mean employers would have to pay more to workers. This is STILL TRUE. But the fact remains, fans of Trump and anti-anti-Trump people: Trump never wants to economically help workers or, ahem, bring in more immigrants who would be line workers. And neolibs in both parties don't want massive infrastructure because it would help workers over employers (It is why I was so surprised by neolib Biden's NLRB policies, as it was a break from Clinton and Obama, not just Republicans, including Trump).
The worst part of all this, for me at least, is most Americans receive pro-corporate economics lessons in both high school and college. Most Americans don't realize how corporate media propaganda continually supports a right wing corporate capitalist (known as neoclassical economics) narrative that even Pete Buttigieg, the Clintons, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Barry Obama buy into. This seeps into social media as I see even people on my FB feed keep posting the scene in "Ferris Bueller" where Ben Stein plays the economics high school teacher talking about tariffs. Stein, whose Dad (Herbert Stein) was a respected conservative economist who ALWAYS hated the New Deal, repeats the tired and incorrect nostrum that the Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930 was what really sent us into the Depression. Sorry, Ben, Herb, and even John Kenneth Galbraith, you are all WRONG.
I wish I could post online the old labor-side economics guy, Gus Tyler, and his great essay in the late 1980s that put that to the lie it is.* It was published in the now defunct (?) "New Leader," an old labor oriented magazine. To summarize its points: The Great Depression was initially caused by people buying stock on loans from banks, and, banks, when collecting the collateral for those loans, as most never had the money to pay back the loans, started to go under more and more as the value of the collateral declined more and more. Second, there was a larger drop in the GNP (now GDP) BEFORE the S-H Tariff went into effect than after. Third, only 10% of our economy relied on imports. Fourth, the S-H Tariff was, for the most part, only a marginal increase in the tariffs that already existed. Therefore, to think this one tariff passed in 1930 was a primary cause of the Depression getting worse is, well, dumb. It is why I consider most econ high school and college econ teachers to be, well, morons.
Thus, in the last decade or more, I've been more against tariffs than for tariffs. And Atrios, a rare smart economist, is absolutely correct to say we shouldn't buy into the current liberal and business-conservative chatter that says tariffs are always and elementarily bad on principle. They are not. They are situational. They definitely played a positive role in building up our nation's industrial capacity throughout the 19th Century. Tariffs also played a hugely positive role in China, Japan, and South Korea in building up their economies in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Today, though, for the US at least, tariffs are not such a great idea. Atrios also states, most insightfully:
(a) Ahem, liberals: Biden kept most of Trump 1.0's tariffs and added more in the late part of his one term; and
(b) It is well past time for regular Americans to reject the pro-free trade assumptions we have bought into since the early 1990s. The only valid question is a practical one: What policies help workers and consumers, and, as a sub-part, what polices will help workers more than consumers or vice versa? The answer to the question and sub-question reveals why we should not be pro- or anti-tariff as if we are standing on some principle. It is why I merely call myself a socialist-oriented person as it is simply an aesthetic or philosophical feeling. You know, the way someone may even think of their religion, though I find the idea that socialism is a religion to be an invitation to confusion and worse. The only thing an ideology shares with religion is that both carry a philosophical default mechanism and generality of a set of principles. However, when it comes to political-economy, and public policy, the policy-making should override, when reasonably necessary, the political-economy principle. Why? Because the best public policy making is empirically-based, situational, and relative. At some point, every public policy should be tweaked or significantly reformed, again depending upon the circumstances. Smart religious and smart ideological thinking requires this recognition--or else we get the excesses that cause religions and ideologies to amass a bunch of dead bodies.
God, I hope this is clear to at least some of us.
*If only Dissent would take another article he wrote for the magazine in the Spring of 1988 from behind the subscription wall.
