World trade was already deflating before Smoot Hawley passed, it did excelerate the collapse but it did not start it.
And this time, the “kept labor and material costs to high...poor people could not afford them..”
Has been replaced with “once working class people have had their job outsourced to a different country and now are Obama’s and the Dhimmcrats surprising voters”
And that is the unspoken about Globalism, the more successfully it is implemented, the more Democrat Voters are created.
Obamacare is a disaster waiting to happen, regardless of the Smoot Hawley reference, if anything it creates uncertainties in an already uncertain US Business climate as well as raises taxes in the middle of a recession.
Isn’t that what Smoot-Hawley did? Raise taxes in the middle of a recession?
Trade was slowing, but still growing.
Trade declined and collapsed in the few years after Smoot.
Further the idea of world trade, free trade, commerce across national lines, that idea was flushed, by Smoot, and Hawley, down the drain, especially in Germany and Japan.
And, guess who filled the void with hyper nationalistic jingo?
I could argue that 60 million dead and the economic waste of the thirties, the destruction and war of the 40’s the comparative strength of the Soviet Union and Communism could be laid at the foot of those two idiots.