As you've surely seen by now (including here in Capitolism), President Joe Biden announced a slew of new tariffs last week on "strategic" Chinese imports as part of the federal government's mandated review of the tariffs that then- President Donald Trump put in place in 2018 and 2019. As my Cato colleague Clark Packard and several others noted shortly after Biden's announcement, the tariffs raise a host of practical, legal, political, and geopolitical issues that we'll mostly ignore for today. Instead, we're going to examine the tariffs' economic implications and why the history of U.S. trade policy--both distant and recent--should give American consumers, workers, exporters, environmentalists, and even China hawks reasons to worry. As is often the case, the tariffs' real risks are less about what happens tomorrow and far more about the problems that could materialize in the future, including in the very "strategic" industries the president says he's trying to nurture.
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