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Home – Midterm Election News – Both Parties Aiming to Lose the Midterm Election

Both Parties Aiming to Lose the Midterm Election

This election is a contest to see which party can do its best to lose. Looking forward from mid-September, President Donald Trump’s Republicans seem to be well ahead at this. But the Resistance (or don’t they call themselves that anymore?) Democrats are putting up a contest.

Second-term presidents tend to make political mistakes by doing things they think are right. Franklin Roosevelt and court-packing, Ronald Reagan and Iran-Contra, George W. Bush and the Iraq surge. You can see two examples of this in the second Trump term.

One is his insistence on haphazardly imposing tariffs. It is an example of providing a plentiful quantity of something for which there is no demand among the electorate.

That’s been true for a long time. William McKinley, cited by Trump as a tariff advocate, called for switching from protective to reciprocal tariffs in his last public speech in 1901. Over the next half-century, as economist Douglas Irwin points out in his definitive book “Clashing Over Commerce,” Republican presidents were leery of tariffs, which were supported by congressional leaders as a way of holding their majorities together: You vote for a tariff that helps my local industry, and I’ll vote for one that helps yours.

The definitive moment may have been when, as Jude Wanniski argued years ago, a proposal for a tariff on the dairy product casein got the progressive Wisconsin delegation to join the legislative mob that passed Smoot-Hawley in 1930. Over 1,000 economists signed a petition begging Herbert Hoover to veto the bill, but he signed it anyway, and the Great Depression followed.

Almost no one without a lobbyist wants tariffs now. And voters don’t have to read Irwin to realize that Trump’s tariffs raise prices for consumers and many manufacturers as well.

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