Earlier than Trump’s re-election in November 2024, progressive commentators typically advocated greater US tariffs to attain three overlapping targets: enhance jobs and wages for staff; increase the manufacturing sector; and cut back US commerce deficits. Just a few populist commentators on the correct voiced the identical agenda. However President Trump’s chaotic tariff proposals since his inauguration far exceed the prescriptions of coverage advocates outdoors the president’s internal circle. With that context in thoughts, it’s price summarizing what tariff advocates say, now that Trump’s agenda dominates the headlines.
AFL-CIO
For many years, the nation’s premier labor group has opposed practically all commerce agreements and has endorsed restrictions on manufactured imports, reminiscent of autos (strict guidelines of origin within the USMCA), metal and aluminum (Trump 1.0 tariffs). However AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler issued the next assertion in response to Trump’s tariffs in opposition to Canada and Mexico:
Whereas we help the focused use of tariffs to guard staff from unfair competitors, the Trump administration’s blanket tariffs run the danger of inflicting pointless financial ache for America’s staff with out addressing staff’ core financial priorities. The tariffs on Canada are significantly damaging…
Consultant Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)
Rep. Kaptur is the longest-serving Congresswoman (since 1983). She was a strident opponent of NAFTA, and helps tariffs on manufactured imports, significantly metal. However Kaptur has energetically opposed Trump’s tariffs on the Home flooring and within the media. That is one quote from BlueSky:
The Trump Administration’s imposition of a 25% tariff on US-Canada commerce will severely influence jobs and corporations within the Nice Lakes area, together with throughout Northwest Ohio. Canada is our greatest buying and selling associate and these unneeded tariffs are about to boost your costs on every part.
[image or embed]— Marcy Kaptur (@repmarcykaptur.bsky.social) March 4, 2025 at 10:14 AM
Kaptur urges Trump to focus his tariffs on China and different nations that run giant commerce surpluses with the US.
Lori Wallach, American Civil Liberties Challenge
As a pacesetter within the litigation group Public Citizen, Lori Wallach based and directed the World Commerce Watch in that group. At the moment she is director of the Rethink Commerce program on the American Civil Liberties Challenge. In these roles, Wallach fought in opposition to NAFTA, the WTO, and the TPP. In her personal phrases, “I opposed corporate-rigged commerce offers/hyperglobalization and supported industrial coverage earlier than it was cool.”
Wallach’s views are largely posted on movies and YouTube appearances. Right here is an excerpt from a latest interview:
Tariffs are a part of the method of the instruments you utilize to try to reestablish our capability to make issues right here that we want and create good jobs for the two-thirds of Individuals who don’t have a school diploma, so making photo voltaic panels, drugs, EVs… However slapping on tariffs on Mexico and Canada, ostensibly about migration and drug trafficking, is not only ineffective — I imply, it’s like attempting to do surgical procedure with a saxophone as a substitute of a scalpel — but in addition goes to be damaging. It’s going to trigger monumental disruption, however with none of the outcomes and targets that one would possibly really wish to use a tariff to attain to assist working individuals or construct our resilience.
Financial Coverage Institute
The Financial Coverage Institute (EPI) has lengthy criticized commerce agreements and advocated tariff safety for the manufacturing sector. Thea Lee, a acknowledged progressive voice on commerce points, was president of the EPI from 2017 to 2021 earlier than serving as Deputy Undersecretary for Worldwide Labor Affairs within the Division of Labor from 2021 to 2025. Lee and EPI chief economist Josh Bivens have formed the EPI’s commerce agenda.
In February 2025 (up to date in March 2025), EPI printed a “Truth Sheet” on tariffs with in depth feedback on Trump’s agenda. Key excerpts:
Tariffs can do quite a few helpful issues…[But h]igh and broad-based tariffs [cannot] repair the US commerce deficit or rebuild manufacturing employment…principally as a result of excessive and broad-based tariffs may even cut back exports together with imports, and it will depart the steadiness of commerce principally unchanged.” Furthermore, “American households will bear many of the burden of upper tariffs. It will principally come via greater costs for imported items and, crucially, greater costs for home items that compete with imports.”
Tariffs shouldn’t turn out to be a major income supply for presidency spending as a result of, “Tariffs are primarily a tax on consumption and are, therefore, extra regressive than most present federal income sources.”
And to conclude, “Slim, strategic tariffs could be a great tool. Trump’s broad-based, chaotic tariffs would price customers in each state.”
Clyde Prestowitz, Financial Technique Institute
Founding father of the Financial Technique Institute, Prestowitz served within the Reagan Administration as a Counselor to the Secretary of Commerce. Together with over 130 former Republican officers, in 2020 Prestowitz signed an announcement indicating Trump was unfit to serve one other time period in workplace. Prestowitz advocates excessive tariffs on manufactured items as a pro-growth coverage, argues that the economics career has wrongly castigated the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, and contends that liberalizing commerce with China was an historic mistake. However Prestowitz severely criticizes Trump’s tariff agenda for focusing on Mexico, Canada, and the European Union.
Michael Pettis
A finance professor at Peking College and a senior fellow on the Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace, Pettis printed an article in International Affairs shortly after Trump’s election, titled “How Tariffs Can Assist America”. Arguing that economists distilled the mistaken lesson from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, Pettis contends that top tariffs at this time might depress consumption, enhance financial savings, and thereby enhance the US commerce steadiness, particularly in manufactured items. Accordingly, he sees tariffs as a coverage software to spice up progress and lift American residing requirements.
However reflecting on Trump’s proposal for uniform 10 p.c or 20 p.c tariffs, Pettis posted this touch upon X:
Truly I feel across-the-board import tariffs, if correctly carried out, can certainly reverse the US position in accommodating world financial savings and commerce imbalances, however as I’ve mentioned many instances earlier than, they’re the least environment friendly approach, partly as a result of they’re very blunt…
In March 2025, Pettis had this to say about Trump’s tariff agenda:
For now, I don’t suppose Trump’s tariffs can have a lot influence on the general US commerce deficit, which I anticipate to be as giant this yr because it was final yr. It’s only as soon as the US takes severe systemic steps to scale back its commerce deficit that actual commerce disruption will happen.
Oren Cass, American Compass
Founder and Chief Economist of the conservative American Compass, Oren Cass ranks among the many most avid defenders, outdoors the White Home circles, of Trump’s tariff agenda. Like different right-of-center populists, Cass sees the decline of producing jobs as an American calamity:
I feel what we’re seeing within the US economic system at this time is kind of a basic dysfunction that could be a perform of claiming that manufacturing simply doesn’t matter, that we don’t must make something. We are able to have our iPhones designed in California and it doesn’t matter the place they’re really produced.
Writing within the Washington Publish in February 2025, Cass declared,
For all of the lamentations about President Donald Trump’s unconventional volley of tariff threats over the previous week, the result’s remarkably sane — approaching splendid.
No duties had really been imposed on imports from Mexico or Canada, although each nations stepped up their border controls, however “Trump has delivered [tariffs against China] with a precision strike, refuting claims that tariffs can’t be finished effectively.”
Bipartisan Dissent from Unhealthy Concepts
Among the many progressives sampled, no enthusiasm might be discovered for Trump’s tariff agenda. The identical is true of three left-of-center Washington coverage institutes: the Middle for American Progress, the Institute for Coverage Research, and Third Method.
Progressives are distressed by threatened tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and are visibly involved in regards to the regressive cost-of-living influence Trump’s agenda can have on lower-income households. Starting with the NAFTA debate in the course of the Clinton Administration, progressive voices offered the ideological basis for a excessive tariff agenda, however they’re removed from happy with Trump’s implementation.
Populist conservatives cited on this weblog are a blended bag. All three favor excessive tariffs on the manufacturing sector, believing that low-cost client items are a false goal, and are very important of China’s industrial prowess. However solely Oren Cass really embraces Trump’s tariff agenda. On April 2, 2025, Trump will reveal his falsely labeled “reciprocal” tariffs, seemingly designed to confront each US buying and selling associate with greater tariffs. Trump has designated April 2 as “Liberation Day.” The decision of progressive and populist tariff advocates stays to be seen.
