According to reports, the Biden administration is on the verge of announcing a quadrupling of tariffs on Chinese-made EVs, a tax imposed on U.S. importers. He may also announce other pro-Trump tariffs (“Biden to quadruple tariffs on Chinese EVs,” wall street journal, May 10, 2024). That shouldn’t be surprising.
in regulation In a feature two years ago, I predicted that Biden would become Trump 2.0 (“Joe Biden’s economic policy: An early assessment” Spring 2021). I wrote:
In general, Biden’s economic approach is based on a belief (a belief largely shared by President Trump) that we cannot rely on voluntary interactions between free individuals to ensure economic prosperity and personal prosperity. It seems that This is perhaps most evident in the area of international trade, where Mr. Biden is likely to continue Mr. Trump’s policies. The only difference is that the benefits will go to a different corner of the Washington swamp: unions rather than inefficient American corporations. But it’s all one big swamp. President Trump had Peter Navarro oversee his protectionist policies, but Biden has a Navarro imitator in his inner circle to oversee his protectionist policies. Clearly, Biden and his cronies no more understand than Trump that economic efficiency is defined in terms of consumer satisfaction, not producer privilege.
…Like Trump, Biden does not believe in free trade, but in what he (and his union leadership supporters) define as “fair trade.” He promises to “stand up for America.” Protectionism is the area where Biden is most likely to become Trump 2.0.
If he moves forward with his reported protectionist plans, Trump 2.0 will be more Trumpian than Trump 1.0 in this area. As I argued in a recent post, protections for environmental property are particularly farcical. “”Please refer to.The farce of clean energy dumping, Econlog, April 1, 2024. But it is no more economically irrational and dangerous than Trump’s nationalism.
Underlying all this is a phenomenon that economists are accustomed to seeing in political economy: politicians’ desire for power over institutional interests and the logic of interventionism breeds interventionism.this morning wall street journalHolman Jenkins summarizes one aspect of the logic of politics (“Which trade war is worse, President Trump or President Biden?“):
Mr. Biden is giving every indication that he will start a global trade war to protect the expensive and uncompetitive green energy industry he has built at home with taxpayer dollars.
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This post uses the same featured image (reproduced below) used in the previous article.The farce of clean energy dumping” As I explained there, my thoughts on DALL-E are that Chinese solar panels and EVs will fall like manna from the sky, Commerce Department officials will shoot the goods, and people will collect them. It was said that they were trying to prevent this. In order to get Darui’s half of his cooperation, he had to explain that the Commerce Department employees’ guns shoot roses.
Commerce Department agents stop Americans from harvesting green manna from China (DALL-E)
