The Unintended Consequences of Trump’s Tariffs

Tariffs haven’t done much to shrink the U.S. trade deficit, and experts are warning about collateral damage.

President Donald Trump‘s ongoing effort to rewrite America’s role in several long-standing trade agreements appears to have done little to rein in the country’s ballooning trade deficit last year, as America’s goods imbalance clocked in at a record $891.2 billion.

Economists broadly agree that the trade deficit isn’t a particularly accurate indicator of economic health – and, in fact, many have argued that the deficit climbed in part last year because the U.S. performed so admirably in the face of global economic malaise.

But the deficit has been a long-standing bugaboo for Trump. His stated desire to combat the trade shortfall appears to have been the driving force behind most of his major trade shakeups to this point in his presidency: the decisions to walk away from the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, to reshape the North American Free Trade Agreement into a new deal that is hardly certain to make it through Congress, and to threaten or implement a slew of tariffs and barriers on products ranging from washing machines from South Korea to cars from Europe and steel from virtually everywhere.

View the complete March 7 article by Andrew Soegel on The U.S. News and World Report website here.