Last week, President Trump issued a memorandum calling for a study on how to implement a “Fair and Reciprocal Plan” for tariffs. It’s due within 180 days but Trump already knows idea what it will say.

That’s because he commissioned a similar study in 2019, which purported to show that he could lower the trade deficit by matching foreign countries’ higher tariffs. This conclusion was pure fiction.

The 2019 study had several problems. One of the most glaring of these was that it didn’t consider the prospect of eliminating tariffs in new trade deals with foreign countries.

It dropped members of U.S. free trade agreements from its analysis and turned a blind eye to the benefits of future ones. This cleared the way for the 2019 study to focus on its main complaint: namely, that the World Trade Organization’s unconditional most-favored-nation framework is unfair to the U.S.

By this, the 2019 study meant that in its review of nearly 700,000 most-favored-nation tariffs, it found that foreign countries had higher rates than the U.S. on 67 percent of these, lower rates on 20 percent and equal rates on 13 percent. In some cases, the differences were sizable. On autos, for example, the U.S.'s most-favored-nation tariff stands at 2.5 percent, versus 10 percent for the European Union, 15 percent for China and 35 percent for Brazil.

This led to the question Trump wants answered in the new........

© The Hill