Fact Checking a US-initiated Trade War
This week at an event in the Rose Garden of the White House the US president announced a global US policy of trade tariffs the he described as "liberation day" in the United States.
Here at GreenPolicy360 we have decided, as we consider worldwide impacts of this presidential decision, to launch a new webpage -- "Fact Checking a US-Initiated Trade War". The impacts and consequences of what is already being described in news headlines as a Trade War deserves its own page and so here we go...
A US-initiated trade war, an updated 'neo-mercantalism' is a new use for an old policy, a belief expressed by the current president that the presidency of William McKinley in the late 1800s, a time of tariffs and protectionism, was a golden age. (Others called this era of the late 1800s the "Era of the Robber Barons". President Trump's new direction in this sense is an old direction that was abandoned in the 1900s after Smoot-Hawley tariffs and the Great Depression.
The Republican party is returning, in a repositioning, to policies from the past. We will see how it turns out this time.
One thing can be said about the tariffs of the 21st century, facts will tell the tale. Large and small there will be costs and benefits, pluses and minuses, pros and cons and we will look closely at and beyond Gross National Product/Gross Domestic Product (GNP/GDP) as the political economy of a trade war is revealed.
On this page we will go 'down a rabbit' hole, as the saying goes, and explore the consequence of the Trump tariffs, trade barriers, taxes and threats. The consequences and results of the Trump tariffs extend far beyond trade and now will bring on a repositioning of how the countries of the world see and deal with the United States ...
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Now, each country will have to come before the president and negotiate, or accept a fait accompli which means in English, a done deal. Some countries and voices across the spectrum are talking of confronting 'the bullying'.
Tariffs give Trump a unilateral power to punish and reward businesses as he sees fit.
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Associated Press / April 2, 2025
Trump, in a Rose Garden announcement on Wednesday, said he was placing elevated tariff rates on dozens of nations...
Trump’s Misleading Tariff Chart
In his Rose Garden announcement of sweeping new “reciprocal tariffs,” President Donald Trump held aloft a misleading chart that claimed to give a breakdown of the tariffs other countries charge the U.S. and the corresponding tariff that the U.S. will now impose against those countries...
Economists told us that’s not a legitimate way to calculate reciprocal tariffs for countries.
“Those listed numbers are simply not tariffs, but some other made-up measure based on a formulaic trade deficit calculation,” Kimberly Clausing, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told us via email. “In almost every instance, countries’ true trade barriers are far, far lower.”
“This is not a legitimate way to calculate trade barriers, and the vast majority of subject matter experts (I would wager >99% of international economists) would reject this methodology as profoundly flawed.”
Money in Politics
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April 4, 2025
Sampling Reactions
Wall Street Journal
After the mid-week announcement, Wall Street was plunged into a two-day rout that erased $6.6 trillion in stock-market value. Trump on Saturday morning urged Americans to stay the course through what he called an economic revolution.
Barron's
When it comes to tariffs, Donald Trump holds all the cards. The launch of tariffs against virtually every other nation on April 2 finds Trump unleashed. As a second-term president whose party has been reshaped by his movement, he is free to follow his political instincts. And those instincts are leading him, and the world, straight into economic warfare.
China News
Beijing said the U.S. action “seriously undermines China’s legitimate rights and interests” and labeled it “a typical unilateral bullying practice.” With approval from the State Council, China confirmed it will add a 34% tariff to every U.S. import arriving after April 10 at 12:01 a.m.
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