When Donald Trump famously announced his Liberation Day tariff assault on the world last April, economists, almost en masse, warned the US economy was headed for a major supply-side shock.
It was self-evident, they said, that tariffs of this scale would push up prices and input costs, simultaneously squeezing real income and profits.
Liberals could hang their hat on the prospect of a major Maga own-goal.
Trump’s 2025 tariffs went far beyond the tariffs announced during his first term and even beyond the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 when then US president Herbert Hoover raised import levies on more than 20,000 imported goods to protect domestic US industries from foreign competition as the economy fell off a cliff in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash.
According to the Yale
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