Professor says history can help us try to understand Donald Trump's tariffs – Winnipeg

On what U.S. President Donald Trump calls “liberation day,” U.S. leaders imposed so-called “countdown” tariffs on dozens of foreign countries.

In announcing the news, Trump also mentioned a historical law called the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which he claimed that he would save the United States from the Great Depression if it was not eliminated.

Fact-Investigation Desk is quickly rushing to decide whether the law promotes or curbs the U.S. economy, and social media is quickly overwhelmed by clips from classic movies Ferris Bueller is on vacation, Among the people who were learning about the behavior in the class, his teacher blamed then-U.S. President Herbert Hoover for making the Great Depression worse.

George Buri, a history professor at the University of Manitoba, disagrees with the claim, believing its impact is very trivial.

Buri reveals behind the scenes of that famous film scene, revealing that the actor who plays the Buellers teacher Ben Stein was a free market economist and conservative, and then he turned into a comedian. In the making of the film, the director was actually told to give him a boring lesson.

Buri found his speech interesting because it directly reflects what was said in the 1980s by Thatcher and Reagan times, a period of Keynesian policy and government intervention. Bury believes that the lack of demand has led to the Great Depression, not tariffs.

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“So, as these politicians tried to argue in the 1980s, the right economic policy they prefer is a return to the open market, free trade and free trade. They basically want to say that tariffs are always bad,” he said.

“In the 1980s, there was a new theory that it was not Laissez Faire that really caused depression, so it must be Hawley's tariffs”

At that time President Franklin D.

Meanwhile, Hoover's tariffs are seen as tariffs that fail to improve the economy. With lower demand in various sectors, tariffs aimed at encouraging Americans to buy cheaper domestic goods are meaningless because the prices are already so low. From 1928 to 1933, the price of a bushel of wheat fell from $1.29 to 34 cents.

Although they did create difficult conditions in Canada, the widespread impact of the Great Depression far exceeded that of Hawley's tariffs.

Ottawa even tried to bridge the gap by using reciprocity tariffs, but ultimately failed. Bury said it was the recovery of the United States that helped the integrated natural resource system develop rapidly, while wartime production in the late 1930s quickly increased demand for materials and ended Canada's financial crisis.

Although tariffs seemed to play a trivial role in the Great Depression, they sparked the timeline of the northern countries.

After Britain ended its priority exchange with its imperial colonies, Upper and Lower Canada, as well as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, began trading with its southern neighbors. But these relations became complicated when the United States imposed tariffs in 1866 after Britain supported a coalition of cotton and sugar-rich alliance in the American Civil War.

“It's actually something that was born in Canada,” Bury said.

“In 1866, the United States ended reciprocity, and next year in 1867, up and down Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia decided to form modern Canada based on this new concept, 'We can't trade with the UK, we can't trade with the US, so why don't we trade with each other and form larger entities?”

Once the country is formed, Buri notes that East West expansion is a heightened tariff imposed by John A. MacDonald, forcing Canadians to trade more than 49^Th Parallel and protect new countries from the influence of the United States.

While free trade was the driving force for early economic nationalism, Brie said the movement reappeared in the 1980s as American companies spread north, a side effect of Canada’s smaller economy blended with the financial system of its southern neighbors.

Although tariffs have very different impacts on Canadians and Americans, the history of both countries is full of stories related to tariffs that illustrate their economic policies and developments. Although Bury disagrees with Trump’s approach behind the tariffs, historians understand his reasons.

“There is a real problem with the U.S. economy,” he said.

“It's not entirely random. It's a trend to reverse the trend of US manufacturing decline and the US's increasing reliance on Wall Street and the dollar, as we saw in 2008, which could be the secret to disaster.”

“I think the United States is trying to solve some very real problems on its economy. I don't know if it works.”

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