This isn’t Peter Navarro’s first go as tariff czar. He had the position in 2020.
That year, most prominently, Trump made a deal with China involving tariffs on certain Chinese goods and a commitment by China to buy so much American farm product. (All things considered, I thought this was a good deal.) There were other initiatives, but for various reasons these other initiatives were mostly muted.
In the end, Trump made no progress in closing the trade deficit and raised only a small amount of money on the Chinese tariff.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/06/trump-trade-deficit-426805
To be sure, the budget deficit ballooned (to a level relative to GDP not see since WWII), but the budget deficit was mostly because of paycheck protection and other COVID-related spending. (To be sure, Trump, most Republicans and practically every Democrat were for the spending. Only Freedom Caucus-type Republicans were opposed.)
Now Navarro is back, and it looks as though Trump means business. There’s a lot of uncertainty about this, as Trump has been postponing big tariff increases. But, assuming Trump finally pulls the trigger, we’ll have our big beautiful text of tariffs.
Trump needs to quit stalling on implementing tariffs. He’s trying to capture the market effects of tariffs by threat rather than by implementation. That can only work in the short run. Time to start banging some economic heads...
The decades of one sided trade and no tariff protection is radical. Trump is going back to normal economic policy and protection.
Covid based economic problems and deficits belong, IMHO, two two groups:
China
CIA/Democrats.
It’s obvious that the CIA and the Democrats were involved in the Wuhan lab. It’s obvious that the CCP was involved in the Wuhan lab. It’s obvious that Covid didn’t come from bat soup. It came from the lab, everybody with a brain knows this. Don’t blame Trump for Covid or Covid related deficits, blame the CCP, CIA, and Democrats.
Artificially increasing the price of King Copper by 50% across the board is a downright dumb move. The US produces as much copper as it can and it is a depleting resource compared to the scale of other world class deposits. Raising the price by raising the tariff for such a critical material is inflationary.