By The Free Press | Created at 2025-01-21 23:16:52 | Updated at 2025-01-22 04:11:07
5 hours ago
Why the Deep State Loves Tariffs
More than 25 people stand in a line to make purchases, inside a 99 Cents Only Store, on April 5, 2024 in Torrance, California. (Jay L. Clendenin via Getty Images)
They enable bureaucrats and lobbyists to manipulate the system to their own benefit. For the rest of us, all they do is bring higher costs.
The single most important issue in polls during the last presidential campaign was inflation. Thus it is ironic that one policy Donald Trump has preached with particular fervor is tariffs, the goal of which is to raise prices.
But the greater irony of Trump’s tariff plans is that America’s tariff system is the quintessential example of what he sometimes attacks as the deep state. Tariffs are managed by opaque bureaucracies and manipulated by high-priced lobbyists in order to extract funds from American consumers. And if one’s goal is to pare back the powers of the modern administrative state, abolishing the tariff system would be a good place to start.
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