By Ed Gresser
As the Republican Convention continues this week, candidate Donald Trump’s ideas for a second-term trade policy look remarkably similar to those of his long-gone but never-quite-forgotten Republican predecessor: Herbert Hoover.
Hoover’s 1928 program — a higher tariff across the board — is the obvious ancestor of Trump’s proposed 2024 program of 10 percent tariffs on goods from all countries and 60 percent on Chinese-made products. This would mean a national rate of around 12.5 percent, the highest U.S. tariff since the late 1930s.
Would a Trump tariff in 2025 bring the same results Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Act got then?
