Pray for surrender in Trump’s dumb trade war
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A store displays a ‘Buy Canadian Instead’ in response to President Trump's 25% tariffs on Canadian goods in Vancouver, British Columbia, Feb. 2.
O Canada! Don’t pretend you don’t know what you’ve done to deserve this. For years we have tolerated your provocations. Your curious “bacon." Your cloying niceness.
The whole French thing. You may not be responsible for burying us in fentanyl (a total of 43 pounds seized at the border last year, according to U.S. Border Patrol), but you’ve sent us a lot of noxious material over the decades: Justin Bieber.
Jim Carrey. Tim Horton. And the annoying way you pronounce words—“about" sounds like “a boat"? You thought you could get away with that, eh? And don’t get me started on Mexico.
I tried. There may be some better justification for what the Journal’s editorial board has called “the dumbest trade war in history," but I can’t think of one. What is the objective here behind President Trump’s imposition of 25% tariffs on most imports from Canada and Mexico (10% on Canadian energy), with a 10% charge on Chinese products? Let’s not dwell on the idea that we are somehow “subsidizing" a country with which we run a trade deficit.
And let’s not rehearse the details of how U.S. tariffs hurt American consumers as much as they hurt the producers of the tariffed country, as well as American producers that depend on imported parts. Let’s accept, for the sake of argument alone, what seems to be the president’s position, that trade deficits are intrinsically bad and need to be eliminated by imposing tariffs.
What is the rationale for these tariffs on these countries? Our deficit with Canada accounts for 5% of the total U.S. trade deficit. It’s a fifth of the
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