Columnist shreds Trump’s economic playbook that tariffs made manufacturing great

Did tariffs make America great? According to a New York Times op-ed published Friday, the short answer is no.

Peter Coy, a veteran business and economics columnist for the Times, dug into a report written by two leading economists who set out on a mission to discover if steep tariffs imposed “during America’s Gilded Age – roughly 1870 to 1900” could be credited with the rise of American manufacturing during the period.

What they concluded undercuts former President Donald Trump’s economic plan for the country, which includes imposing huge new tariffs, in he returns to the Oval Office.

“Their conclusion: ‘The era’s high tariffs are unlikely to have helped the United States become a globally competitive manufacturer,’” Coy notes in his op-ed, citing the report by Alexander Klein and Christopher Meissner, which was issued by the Center for Economic and Policy Research in London.

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Coy adds that Trump “isn’t the first to attribute America’s manufacturing success to the tariff wall that made imported products expensive compared with those produced at home.”

“In reality, though, tariffs didn’t make much difference in the United States because the domestic economy was both large and relatively isolated from world trade, Klein and Meissner wrote in their paper,” Coy wrote.

He noted that the economists found that the one area that tariffs did make a difference “was to reduce rather than enhance the productivity of labor, which is the output of goods per hour of work.”

Coy ended his column Friday by telling readers that Klein and Meissner do not directly reference Trump’s fascination with tariffs in their report, but added that “their title gives a hint: ‘Did Tariffs Make American Manufacturing Great? New Evidence from the Gilded Age.’”