President Trump celebrated tax season in grand style last week when he handed Americans a big fat tax hike. Tariffs are taxes on imported products and Trump’s executive order is one of the biggest tax increases in recent American history.

It’s essentially a national sales tax that consumers will pay on top of their local property, state sales and income and federal taxes. The Tax Foundation estimated that the terrible Trump tariffs will amount to an average tax hike of $1,900 annually for American households.

Trump’s tariffs are both reckless and reactionary. They are sadly reminiscent of the punishing 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the economic nationalism that exacerbated the suffering after the onslaught of the Great Depression with the collapse of the stock market the previous year.

Noted economist Robert Shapiro appeared on my podcast, Deadline D.C. with Brad Bannon, and reminded my audience that great economic theorists of all ideological stripes from Karl Marx to Milton Friedman believed really big tariffs are really bad ideas. He went on to say that Trump tariffs constitute a self-inflicted wound to the strength of the American economy.

Tariffs might be the crack in........

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