The global inflation surge has receded, but it remains the single biggest reason why Donald Trump stands a terrifyingly high chance of winning a second term. Voters remain angry that prices rose, especially for groceries, and many of them believe Trump can reverse that, because food cost less when he was president.
The problem is that Trump does not have any ideas to bring down prices. His ideas would, in fact, do the opposite.
At a town hall yesterday, a voter asked Trump what he would do to bring down grocery prices. His answer, typically, rambled through various topics but did include one relevant policy response:
Our farmers are being absolutely decimated right now. And, you know, one of the reasons is we allow a lot of farm product into our country. We’re gonna have to be a little like other countries, we’re not gonna allow so much com— we’re gonna let our farmers go to work.
So, the Trump plan to make food cheaper is to restrict food imports.
That is not exactly a surprise. Trump has been touting a gigantic tariff as an elixir to solve every economic problem. As the campaign has progressed, he has seemed to grow more infatuated with its potential, casually doubling its proposed size and recommending it as the answer to an ever-wider array of problems.
There is a reasonable strong consensus for targeted tariffs for security (such as tariffs on strategic goods produced by China, a global military competitor). This second category of tariffs was designed to nurture important domestic firms that pay high wages, typically manufacturing complex goods like automobiles or airplanes. This form of tariff is rejected by most economists, but it does have some intellectual support.
Trump is proposing something that goes well beyond either of these categories. He wants to impose a tariff not just on strategic items, or even on goods related to manufacturing, but on every import, including food.
There is absolutely no economic basis for imposing a tariff on food. (You might want to protect domestic agriculture if you were reliant on imports to feed the population and worried that wartime enemies could starve you out, but that does not apply to the United States and never has.) Food tariffs simply increase food prices, for the “benefit” of impelling more of your domestic population to work in agriculture. Is there a strategic, economic, or social reason to reallocate workers from manufacturing and services (or retirement) to farm work? There is not.
It is obvious even to noneconomists that restricting food imports will cause food prices to rise, rather than to fall. But Trump does not understand even the simplest economic concepts. His mind is so fixated on zero-sum thinking that, when presented with a problem (food prices are too high), the only cause he can think of is that other countries must be hurting us, and he will resolve the problem by hurting them (preventing them from selling us food).
Republican elites are mostly ignoring this plan and hoping Trump can somehow be talked out of implementing it after he gets into office. The flaw with this plan is that Trump, for all his expertise in the areas of inheritance, tax fraud, media manipulation, and swindling, does not understand economics. He also has unlimited faith in his own brilliance. It is possible external circumstances may propel him back into the White House, but he truly has no solutions to the problems that people expect him to solve.
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