Tariffs are to Economic Growth What a Bacon-Cheeseburger Is to Weight Loss
You can lose weight IN SPITE OF a mega-cheeseburger-a-day habit, but you'll never lose weight BECAUSE OF that habit.
Bastiat’s Windows likes to answer readers’ emails and comments promptly. However, that hasn’t always been the case over the past six months, which saw the final stages of my wife’s illness and the avalanche of correspondence and executorial red-tape that followed. In those months, a number of people have asked me about the tariff regime imposed by the Trump Administration, and I was not alway diligent at responding. Sincere apologies.
The questions have generally fallen into two categories:
FROM TRUMP SUPPORTERS: Given the positive economic numbers of recent months, are you finally ready to admit that Trump’s tariffs have been a net positive for economic growth?
FROM TRUMP OPPONENTS: Can you please explain the logic of how Trump’s tariffs will be a net positive for economic growth?
Here’s my answer to both groups: Tariffs are to economic growth what a bacon-cheeseburger is to weight loss. You can lose weight in spite of a mega-cheeseburger-a-day habit, but, realistically, you'll never lose weight because of that habit. Equivalently, economies can experience economic growth in spite of tariffs, but they never experience growth because of tariffs. Various happy factors are currently boosting the U.S. economy sufficiently to overcome the damage done by President Trump’s shambolic tariffs. And lest I be accused of Trump Derangement Syndrome, I’ll offer that one can certainly argue that today’s robust growth is to some extent attributable to non-protectionist aspects of the Trump Administration’s economic policies.
In an earlier essay, I noted that a talented economic theorist can postulate scenarios in which tariffs boost economy-wide growth. However, such models require bizarre assumptions and assume that policymakers have godlike powers to observe economic data and to control the behavior of the hundreds of millions of people generating those data. Similarly, a clever bariatrician might well offer a theoretical reason why consuming vast quantities of cheeseburgers leads to weight loss (e.g., maybe burgers suppress the appetite for the rest of the day). But no sensible nutritionist would recommend such a diet. It is extremely unlikely that the peculiar theoretical conditions will be met, and the bacon-cheeseburger diet would yield additional health problems other than weight gain. Equivalently, aside from slowing economic output and growth, tariffs damage the economy, the political system, and international relations in other ways.
I often ask Trump supporters, “If you want your guy to succeed, why on earth would you encourage him to pursue a policy as counterproductive and self-destructive as his tariff regime?” For those interested in my reasoning, I refer you back to my earlier essays, whose logic is in no way negated by the current growth of the U.S. economy.
The Self-Harm of Economic Populism: “Tax the Rich” and “Tariff China” are equivalently self-destructive nonsense (7/22/24). Discusses why “China will pay for the tariffs” is absolute nonsense.
The Gulf of Trump: A nautical-neurological exploration of Donald Trump's support for tariffs (2/12/25). Suggests six reasons President Trump might favor tariffs, including, “Trump heard about tariffs and thinks they’re just kind of cool and that they will bother people he can’t stand.”
Tired of Winning, Apparently: Dear Republicans: Donald Trump's economically incoherent tariff policy has the potential to tank the economy and derail the rest of his agenda. Dear Democrats: Hold off on the self-congratulations. (4/10/25). Discusses the superstitions behind tariffs and suggests that Democrats not get all high-and-mighty on this topic, given their own sordid recent history.
Real-World Trade-Deficit Math-Magic: Long ago, I helped bankers lending billions of dollars in Africa by teaching them a few equations related to trade deficits. Those equations are critical to understanding today's tariff controversies. (4/20/25). Discusses the logical impossibility of greater foreign investment in America AND a lower trade deficit.
Trade Winds 2025—Seriously and Literally: The third and final installment of my April trilogy on Trump and tariffs. (4/24/25). Summarizes the earlier articles.
HERE WE GO AGAIN
Adam Smith successfully shredded the argument for tariffs in 1776, and David Ricardo helped finish the job in 1817. The fact that politicians keep rolling this particular rock up the mountain like Sisyphus doesn’t negate the veracity of the case against tariffs.
One of my favorite articles on the subject was a September 24, 1996 Wall Street Journal article by Holman Jenkins: Two Brave Reporters Battle Reality and Get Whupped. Jenkins wrote:
“You know it’s an election year because the Philadelphia Inquirer has loosed another megaseries by reporters Donald Bartlett and James Steele portraying the U.S. economy as bleakness itself. ‘America: Who Stole the Dream?’
Their latest opus, an anecdotal avalanche, purports to prove the evils of foreign trade and immigration. To say their view of the global economy is one-sided, though, would be drastically to understate their intellectual aphasia. Their grasp begins and ends with the assumption that exports are good and imports are bad. Their anecdotes are interesting; their attempts at context are hilarious.
‘In 1995,’ they write, ‘$1 billion worth of computers were exported to the United States from China. U.S. companies exported a mere $267 million in computers to China. While Washington talks about high-paying jobs created by high-tech goods, our exports to China resemble those of a Third World country. Of the top 20 products exported in 1995, ranked by value, four were agricultural’—$2.3 billion worth of cotton, corn, wheat and soybean oil.
Now, anybody who has ever peeked inside a computer plant knows that assembling computers is on an intellectual par with ditch-digging. That’s why those jobs flee to places where the wages match the needed skill level. By contrast, a ‘Third World’ American farmer is running one of the highest-tech enterprises on the planet, requiring a knowledge of meteorology, heavy machinery, genetics, chemistry and the Black-Scholes model of options pricing. Upstream from our ‘Third World’ farm economy lie a vast chemical industry, machinery makers, biotech research and related industries; downstream, everything from railroads to the trading pits of the Chicago Board of Trade.
And almost nowhere in this complex will you find an American doing a job as insipid and unremunerative as assembling computers.
But then the very air around the Inquirer’s deep thinkers is redolent of a bygone age when the hallmark of progress was to have millions droning away in rote manufacturing jobs. Even their idea of “high tech” seems strangely centered on keypunch or factory work that just happens to involve making computers.”
A similar piece is Dan Rottenberg’s Broad Street Review piece, “Who stole their brains?: Bartlett and Steele’s “Betrayal of the American Dream.’”
HIGH-PEOPLE IDEAS
And finally, here’s Dave Chappelle’s 2017 riff on President’s Trump’s views on international trade (which were mainstream Democratic Party views until the day Trump snatched them away). Chappelle’s 52-second clip suggests his grasp of international economics exceeds that of most contemporary politicians—Democratic or Republican. Chappelle spoke of Trump’s plans to “get those jobs from China and bring them back here to America,” Chappelle asks:
“For what, ------? So iPhones can be $9,000? Leave that job in China where it belongs. None of us want to work that hard. What the f--- is he thinkin? I wanna WEAR Nikes. I don't wanna MAKE them s--ts.”
Be warned—Chappelle uses some words that Bastiat’s Window hesitates to publish and other words that Bastiat’s Window will absolutely never publish.
One would agree with you, and Adam Smith and David Ricardo, in a world of perfect microeconomic models, models of sombreros from Mexico and coffee beans from Columbia, that tariffs are economically illogical and harmful.
In the real world, there may be strategic reasons for the US to assume those tariff costs—think shipbuilding, rare-earth mining and processing, and pharmaceutical manufacturing—as well as tactical reasons the biggest being forcing our trading partners to reduce their own decades long tariff regimes and non-tariff impediments.
Donald Trump is a self-aggrandizing blowhard so anyone believing his political rhetoric on “beautiful tariffs” might be better off taking economic advice from Dave Chappell.
On the other hand, perhaps Trump’s entire tariff gambit is meant as a replacement for ineffectual and ignored WTO rules, using the buying-power advantage of the US market to level the playing field in a way Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and every microeconomics professor would describe “in a perfect world…”
It’s as if eating a greasy cheeseburger satiates your hunger and makes you eat less, and fewer carbs!
Or something like that.
Can't you say that about taxes in general? Any tax is a burden on growth. There is nothing special about tariffs as opposed to an income, sales, property, use, whatever tax. The idea of taxes is that it will promote "general welfare"., roads, schools, police, fire, defense, fillintheblank. More than likely it goes to pet projects, projects that benefit a few, studies, graft, trains to nowhere, etc. The best tax is no tax as the best minimum wage is zero. But we live in the real world, not economic theory world. Ontario Canada banned American alcohol in April. Crown Royal Bottler is shutting down its plant there and moving to the US. It will still bottle in Canada for the Canadian market but move the US operations to the US. So more jobs here. Good\bad?