US Exports, Imports, and Tariffs: The 250-Year Perspective

Douglas A. Irwin offers a brisk overview of a great American tradition–specifically, “America’s been arguing over trade for more than 250 years” (Peterson Institute for International Economics, July 1, 2026). I won’t rehearse the arguments here, but instead offer a couple of his big-picture graphs. The first shows imports (blue line) and exports (red line) as a share of GDP from 1790 to 2025. Two patterns jump out at me. One is that from about 1840 to 1970, US imports and exports tended to hover around about 5% of GDP. From about 1970 up to around 2010, trade as a share of GDP rises dramatically, but in the last decade or so it has levelled off. The other pattern worth noting is that during most of US history up through the early 1990s, imports and exports were in rough balance, with occasional exceptions. But for the last 30 years or so, US imports have consistently exceeded exports. To put it another way, total US consumption (including imports) has been exceeding total US…