All About Tariffs

I have made no secret of me deep skepticism about President Trump’s tariff policies since he announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025. My first-blink “Thoughts on the Trump Tariffs” from a few days after the announcement has held held up reasonably well, and I have posted follow-ups on the subject a number of times since. For an overview of economic thinking on the subject, I recommend the six-paper symposium on tariffs in the Summer 2026 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (where I work as Managing Editor). Of course, I’m sure that all readers of this blog have already scrutinized these papers at great depth. But on the off chance you were pursuing other plans when the issue was published in August, it seemed worth mentioning here. I will not try here to summarize the papers in depth, but instead just to tell you something interesting about each one. In “US Tariff Policy since 1789,” Miguel Acosta, Lydia Cox, Andrew Greenland, John Lopresti, Christopher M.…