“A tariff is a tax on a foreign country,” Trump asserted at an Aug. 19 rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., for example.
Questioned during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Aug. 25 about the effect of Trump’s tariffs on ordinary households — and economists’ conclusion that consumers pay the price — Vance asserted that “economists really disagree about the effects of tariffs.”.
In two polls conducted by the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, panels of economists unanimously agreed that American households would pay the price for Trump’s tariffs.
Those opinions held in a March 2018 poll and a May 2019 poll of panels of 43 leading academic economists.
These levies amounted to a tax of some $80 billion a year on American consumers, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation recently calculated.
That underscores the fakery purveyed by Trump and Vance about the purported virtues of tariffs.
Certainly the economists polled by the University of Chicago didn’t think so, and the Tax Foundation found that, on balance, the Trump tariffs cost jobs. »
