I’m often befuddled by some of the suggestions put forward by our elected representatives on how to solve Americas trade disparity with countries like China, or how we address the problem of American companies shipping jobs to Mexico. What is even more frustrating is how blindly Americans latch on to these ideas and support them. Take Donald Trump for example. He has advocated all of the following: - Build a wall Mexico will pay for- Go after China for currency manipulation- Tax companies that send jobs overseas How is he going to do all this? The answer is Tariffs. In today's episode, we're going to talk about what tariffs do to an economy using American history. There is nothing new under the sun. Whether you're talking about war, politics or economics we can look to history and find evidence of how different ideas and policies played out in practice. A failure to learn from these events causes us to promote ideas that have disastrous consequences. Tariffs are no different.
