[RayChuang88]

Not a good idea. Read up on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and how that made the depths of the Great Depression worse.

I'd rather have streamlined business regulations and a much simpler, more business-friendly tax code to really stimulate real business growth in the USA. In effect, make American businesses way more competitive in the export market.

[DannyTN]

Smoot Hawley wasn’t passed until 2 years into the Great Depression.

And at that time imports were only equal to 5% of GNP. There is no way that tariffs caused or even contributed greatly to the Great Depression.

Today, imports are equal to 16% of GNP and 23% of Americans are unemployed.

[familyop]

"Not a good idea. Read up on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and how that made the depths of the Great Depression worse."

But don't read from the last ten years of rhetoric vomited by opinion columnists sponsored by the most influential constituents (those who also sponsor the media). Start here for some facts.

President Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Bill in June of 1930. Investments and GDP were declining steeply before Smoot-Hawley passed. GDP increased in 1934, while Smoot-Hawley was still in effect.

Not only was Hoover a Republican, but Smoot and Hawley were also Republicans. The onset of WWII wasn't the cause of the upturn, as the economy was reviving long before that.

Gross Domestic Product (ref. 1929 dollars in millions)

Year    GDP

1929   101,444
1930    91,513
1931    84,300
1932    70,682
1933    68,337
1934    74,609
1935    85,806
1936    95,798
1937   103,917
1938    96,670
1939   103,736
1940   112,961
1941   126,237

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Series 08166.

Compensation from before World War I through the Great Depression

by Robert VanGiezen and Albert E. Schwenk
Bureau of Labor Statistics

John T. Dunlop and Walter Galenson, eds., Labor in the Twentieth Century (New York, Academic Press, 1978), p. 30.

Dunlop and Galenson, p. 27.

Year	Unemployment rate
1923-29	3.3
1930	8.9
1931	15.9
1932	23.6
1933	24.9
1934	21.7
1935	20.1
1936	17.0
1937	14.3
1938	19.0
1939	17.2
1940	14.6
1941	9.9
1942	4.7

"I'd rather have streamlined business regulations and a much simpler, more business-friendly tax code to really stimulate real business growth in the USA. In effect, make American businesses way more competitive in the export market."

I would, too, but big, government-linked import interests aren't going to reverse their decades of work in local governments at outlawing new, small production shops (outlawing potential competition). Only one of their many efforts against new, potential, domestic competition.

[plain talk]

I'd rather have streamlined business regulations and a much simpler, more business-friendly tax code to really stimulate real business growth in the USA. In effect, make American businesses way more competitive in the export market.

Yep. I agree. Adding more taxes on the American people is what liberals like to do and it's a bad idea. I am also suspicious that 2M people stopped looking for work. That makes no sense. How could the workforce decline to 1970s levels? There has been a lot of population growth since then. This corrupt administration is just trying to lower the unemployment rate thinking average people will not notice the finagling.

[central_va]

Not a good idea. Read up on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff and how that made the depths of the Great Depression worse.

Ah the Smoot Hawley boogie man.

Imports during 1929 were only 4.2% of the United States' GNP and exports were only 5.0%. Monetarists, such as Milton Friedman, who emphasize the central role of the money supply in causing the depression, note that the Smoot-Hawley Act only had a contributory effect on the entire U.S. economy

[TomasUSMC]

Without tariff we fund Communist China’s technological growth and our own economic death. We are in the Nuclear Age not the 1930s.