President Donald Trump speaks during an event to announce new tariffs in the White House Rose Garden on April 2.Mark Schiefelbein/AP
Justin Wolfers teaches economics 101 at the University of Michigan. It’s an introductory course about supply, demand, and trade. The basics. He wishes President Donald Trump had attended.
Wolfers, an Australian known for his research on how happiness relates to income, is one of the more prominent economists speaking out against Trump’s sweeping tariffs. He says they not only betray the most basic laws of economics, but could very well tip the US into a completely avoidable recession.
In early April, Trump announced a series of tariffs not seen in the US since the Depression. The plan roiled the stock market, unsettled the bond market, and is resulting in an unprecedented global trade war. A week later, Trump backed off somewhat by announcing a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, but remained in an escalating tit-for-tat with China, with no end in sight.
Trump has always argued that tariffs are needed to bring back manufacturing jobs to the US, which have been declining for half a century. But Wolfers says the president’s vision is misguided and steeped in fantasy. Even if the US can claw back manufacturing power in the future, he says, it will be dominated by automation and robotics, not humans.
“What we have here is an economic policy that’s fundamentally driven by nostalgia,” Wolfers says. “This is not how you rebuild the middle class.” He doesn’t know what the future of work will look like in the US but adds: “What I want to do is trust that people will make their own damn choices.”
On this episode of More To The Story, Wolfers sits down with host Al Letson to discuss why today’s tariffs are markedly different from the ones Trump imposed in 2018, the likelihood that the US tips into a recession, and ultimately how Trump’s tumultuous tariff plan might affect you.
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