Column By John Young
The immense irony about what this president has done with the economy is that only the Supreme Court can save him — from himself.
He says a ruling by the Supremes against his willy-nilly, go-it-alone-meaning-by-me-myself-and-I tariffs would be “a disaster for the economy.”
Run that assertion past shoppers, retailers, importers, manufacturers, farmers, and just about any economist you choose.
In the face of the inflation it has caused, the White House’s vaunted “affordability initiatives” have the clang of “Infrastructure Week” on repeat.
The only game-changer, until this president is de-fanged by voters when they elect a new Congress, will be for the court to abolish his tariffs.
The tariffs are the disaster. They have roiled the world economy. They have set producers adrift in a sea of uncertainty. They have caused grocery costs to soar. They have negated the progress President Biden and the Fed achieved in battling the inflation they and we inherited from COVID.
Supposedly, the whole idea of these tariffs was to supercharge American manufacturing. That’s happening exactly nowhere.
Recall what Biden did with infrastructure and investments in semiconductors and clean energy.
Forget that, say the shadow rulers of Big Carbon. Feed us, MAGA, though we are full to burst.
The administration is telling us it can’t release the newest figures about the GDP, blaming the shutdown. Convenient.
The president has always talked as if he had a plan for prosperity (see, “Health Care”). Mariana Mazzacuto, who runs the Institute of Public Innovation at University College London, calls what she sees an “idiosyncratic hodgepodge” where rhyme and reason are treated like, oh, diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The president “isn’t asking ‘What are the problems that need to be solved and how can we have public investment to solve those problems?’” she tells Politico. He’s “just throwing tariffs around” and “dismantling things.”
One of the sorely un-emphasized stories of this moment in time is the brain drain of the public sector, the wave of retirements and accepted buyouts — 154,000 federal employees, an 18 percent surge from last year.
These are the people who are (or were) planning and maintaining our dams and canals, our interstates and bridges. They are (or were) at the forefront of the war on cancer and infectious diseases.
On the altar of false economy, this president has crippled this essential element of our economy. To what end?
This administration, says Mazzacuto, doesn’t exhibit any policy that “is future- and opportunity-oriented around innovation.”
Its trademark instead: “preventing stuff from happening.”
Back to the tariffs:
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer writes in The Washington Post that she supports tariffs in a strategically limited fashion, but not blanket, punitive trade policies. She says they must be targeted at egregious global rivals, not neighbors and friends. Also, the money raised should go to build the industries hurt by unfair competition.
You’d think the tariffs would be cheered in automaking territory, but far from it. The University of Michigan calculates they’ve cost the state 13,000 jobs, part and parcel of over 1 million jobs the nation has lost over the last 10 months.
Why, you ask? Material costs are the most significant reason. But second on the list of concerns voiced by employers is uncertainty.
Indeed, reports Politico, the costs and disruptions associated with tariffs threaten to counteract the generous corporate tax breaks Congress authorized with the Horrible Very Bad Debt-Increasing Bill.
We shouldn’t even be having this discussion. Tariffs are the Congress’s job except in dire moments. The Constitution did not authorize one person, on a whim, to throw the world’s economy into chaos,
The Supreme Court might come to our – and, yes, the MAGA king’s — rescue by rolling back this misadventure.
Then again, the concretized core of right-wingers on the court, having disavowed any notion of checks and balances, just might say, “He’s the boss of us. Democracy be damned.”
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email him at jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
