Trump’s policies fail to learn the lessons that should have been learned from the Great Depression. Nearly 100 years later, America has forgotten what led to her prosperity.
After Trump tariffs, US stocks suffer worst day since 2020
Wall Street’s main indexes suffered their biggest one-day percentage losses since 2020 on Thursday, the day after President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day.
On Monday, the stock market continued its downward spiral. It’s gotten so bad that CNN reported we’re seeing the worst stock market start for a presidential term in modern history.
This is all thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which are helping to end a period of American history where free trade led to unparalleled wealth for our country.
Trump is abandoning the tools that made America prosperous for those that helped prolong the Great Depression. There’s a reason that the world’s poorest nations are those that employ tariffs.
Trump is emulating the policies of the world’s poorest countries
The president is operating under the illusion that other nations are becoming wealthy on the backs of American trade deficits, which is a complete fabrication. In fact, the countries that charge the highest tariffs are typically the poorest.
The Trump administration’s famed “Liberation Day” chart displaying the tariff rates of various countries, compared with their new corresponding American retaliations, perfectly highlights tariffs not working.
Of the countries with the top 10 highest tariff rates against American goods, according to the White House’s own calculations, just three of them ‒ Guyana, Mauritius and Serbia ‒ are among the 100 most prosperous nations in the world, ranked by gross domestic product per capita, and only Guyana ranks in the top 50.
In fact, each of the five nations with the highest calculated rates rank outside the top 120 countries in the world for prosperity.
Trump is furious about poor countries charging the United States tariffs, so he is choosing to emulate their policies. He’s not alone. Many of his supporters believe the same.
Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz on X questioned: “who the f–k does Madagascar think they are?”
Aside from the fact that Madagascar does not charge 93% tariffs, more like 20% on only some imports, Madagascar still ranks very low in GDP per capita
The White House chart really should include the GDP per capita measurements of these nations. If it had, it would be readily apparent that the policies Trump is pursuing don’t work. It is backward for America to abandon the policies that made it a wealthy country in hopes of emulating the policies typical of the world’s poorest countries.
For some reason, Trump views any trade deficit as a loss for America. He does not believe in mutually beneficial transactions, trade is a zero sum game in which there is a winner and a loser.
He ignores the fact that a country that creates components for us to create other goods is helping us, or that outsourcing manufacturing for cheap allows for companies to create more jobs of higher quality in America.
Trump has nostalgia for the America when it was worse off
As much as Trump likes to claim that a lack of tariffs caused the Great Depression, that isn’t the case. While tariffs didn’t cause the Great Depression, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs exacerbated it.
Trump’s new tariffs raise America’s average tariff rate to one not seen since the Great Depression era.
Trump is outright embellishing history. He is nostalgic for a time in American history when the standards of living were substantially worse, and he used the same tools that led to that disastrous period in America’s economy.
Trump wants to return American manufacturing at the expense of the white collar jobs that provide a quality living for the most significant portion of Americans today. There is even little evidence that his goal will be realized, but even if it were, it would not be worth all of this.
Not only do these policies negatively impact national growth as a whole, but they also disproportionately impact poor Americans. Poor Americans use a higher percentage of their income on essential goods, reducing their ability to cut back spending in response to higher prices.
Trump’s policies fail to learn the lessons that should have been learned from the Great Depression. Nearly 100 years later, America has forgotten what led to our prosperity.
Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.