J.D. Vance's Revisionist History

J.D. Vance thinks Donald Trump’s tariffs actually worked: In a cable news segment this weekend, vice-presidential contender J.D. Vance defended his running mate’s first-term tariff policies.

“How do you respond to that charge that Trump’s tariffs would hurt the middle class?” Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker asked Vance in a long sit-down.

“There’s this whole thing that Kamala Harris did at the convention where she made a bunch of claims about what would happen and not enough actually reflection on what already happened, right? Because Donald Trump was already president. He used tariffs to bring manufacturing jobs back to our country, and I think he’ll do it again. And he did it while keeping prices extremely low. Because if you go back to the Trump presidency, we had 12,000 factories that were built during Donald Trump’s presidency. Inflation never really ticked above two percent his entire administration,” responded Vance.

Welker pushed back more, asking him roughly the same question again: “Do you acknowledge that imposing more tariffs will ultimately cost consumers?”

“What it really does is it penalizes importers from bringing goods outside the country, into the country,” responded Vance. “And I think that’s just a necessary thing. We know that China and a number of other countries are using, effectively, slave labor to undercut the wages of American workers. Donald Trump thinks that has to stop.”

“But it caused consumers to pay more,” continued Welker. “They paid more in taxes, $80 billion worth. Do you acknowledge that consumers ultimately will pay more if there are more tariffs imposed?”

Vance ultimately responded with a no. “I think economists really disagree about the effects of tariffs. Because there can be a dynamic effect, right? So what some economists will say is what you just said, that it will actually raise costs for consumers. But what other people say, and I think the record supports this other view, is that it causes this dynamic effect where more jobs come into the country. Anything that you lose on the tariff from the perspective of the consumer, you gain in higher wages, so you’re ultimately much better off.”

Does the record, in fact, say this? “Six years after then-President Donald Trump signed the first tariffs and began a costly U.S.-China trade war, it’s become clear that these tariffs are an abject policy and economic failure,” wrote Jay Derr of the Reason Foundation (the organization that publishes this website) earlier this year. “These tariffs have negatively impacted trade between the U.S. and China, leading importers to shift toward Mexico’s west coast instead of shipping directly to the United States. As a result, trade between Mexico and China has grown by 60% in one year.”

They also, on net, failed to protect American jobs: The U.S.-China Business Council found in 2021, that some 245,000 American jobs were lost as a result of the tariffs. And despite the Trump team’s hopes, U.S. Steel may in fact get sold to Japan’s Nippon Steel Corporation after all (though pulling the deal off is proving complicated).

“The entire
purpose of a tariff is to shift consumer behavior away from politically disfavored goods—such as imports from China—toward domestic-made items that would otherwise lose out in a free market of price competition,” wrote Reason‘s Eric Boehm last month. If reimposed and broadened, “Trump’s proposed 10 percent tariff would be equivalent to a $300 billion tax increase,” reports Boehm. “Assuming other countries would also raise trade barriers in retaliation, the final toll would be more than 825,000 jobs lost, according to Tax Foundation Senior Economist Erica York.” For the typical American household, Trump’s round two would impose costs of an additional $1,500 annually.

Vance is just totally wrong on the merits. If we get more tariffs, it’s American consumers who will have to bear the consequences—after suffering through several years of high inflation that have already taken a big chunk out of their budgets.

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Scenes from New York: I’m somewhat vindicated by this New York magazine profile of the pop artist Charli XCX, who reports that she wasn’t really trying to make a political statement or create political art, yet unfortunately became cable news segment fodder: “With the Kamala tweet, Charli, perhaps for the first time this summer, made a brand misstep. When she fired it off, she was hanging out in her pool at home in L.A. and waiting for Daniel to finish making lunch. She meant it more as ‘something positive and lighthearted’ than a political endorsement, but then Harris’s campaign, clearly aware of what the kids are talking about right now, began posting ‘welcome to kamala hq’ to their new social-media accounts in the style of the album cover. Thus began, in the middle of one of the most disorienting news cycles in recent memory, another in the middle of it, in which political pundits and everyone’s mother were trying to figure out what exactly brat is and what it has to do with Harris.”

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QUICK HITS

• “The founder and CEO of the messaging service Telegram was detained at a Paris airport on an arrest warrant alleging his platform has been used for money laundering, drug trafficking and other offenses,” reports the Associated Press. More here:

BREAKING: #Telegram CEO Pavel Durov arrested by French authorities.

Early official comments to French media suggest this follows from France’s displeasure with Telegram’s moderation & compliance with official requests(?).

If so, I’m pretty sure this is an unprecedented action… pic.twitter.com/hKa1Ip0buD

— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) August 24, 2024

• Israeli forces destroyed thousands of Hezbollah missile launchers in southern Lebanon over the weekend, in what it termed a preemptive strike.
• Food waste and refrigeration and our reliance on the global “cold chain,” from Bloomberg.
• “The Megyn Kelly Show‘s YouTube channel, which has 2.3 million subscribers, had 116.8 million views in July—more views than the official channels for NBC News (78 million) CBS News (83 million), Sky News (87 million), the BBC News (72 million) and CNBC (17 million),” reports Semafor.
• A work of art:

rewatching old episodes of firing line and the guest list is just insane pic.twitter.com/3RDCBkuEP9

— Tim Hwang (@timhwang) August 25, 2024

• lol:

we desperately need a slur for people who don’t understand markets

— tess (@xsphi) August 25, 2024

The post J.D. Vance’s Revisionist History appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2024/08/26/j-d-vances-revisionist-history/