Donald Luskin: The Trade and Tax Doomsday Clocks
[Mr. Luskin is chief investment officer at Trend Macrolytics LLC.]
Thankfully, we're not repeating all the mistakes of 1937. But Congress and the Obama administration are flirting dangerously with one of them by failing to extend the expiring low tax rates for all Americans. What's worse, we're close to repeating the mother of all policy errors, the one made not in 1937 but in 1930—the one that started the Great Depression. We're on track to resurrect the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act....
Last week the House passed the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act. It's an amendment that gives dangerous new protectionist powers to the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the proximate cause of the global Great Depression, which after all these years is still on the books. Democrats—all but five of whom voted in favor of the bill last week—would do well to remember that in 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran as a free-trader, pledging to lower Smoot-Hawley's tariff walls. The 99 Republicans who voted aye should know that Herbert Hoover's name lives in infamy for erecting them. Instead, Wednesday's vote was a bipartisan move to build those walls higher using currencies as the bricks and mortar....
Both issues—extending today's low tax rates, and protectionism against China—are animated by the coming election. Once that has passed, presumably cooler heads on both sides of the aisle will prevail, and these twin threats to our fragile economic recovery will fade away.
But sometimes such things can take on lives of their own. And sometimes in the heat of politics cooler heads do not prevail. If that happens now with issues as critical as these, then the economy and the stock market will be doomed to repeat the tragedies of the 1930s.
Read entire article at WSJ
Thankfully, we're not repeating all the mistakes of 1937. But Congress and the Obama administration are flirting dangerously with one of them by failing to extend the expiring low tax rates for all Americans. What's worse, we're close to repeating the mother of all policy errors, the one made not in 1937 but in 1930—the one that started the Great Depression. We're on track to resurrect the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act....
Last week the House passed the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act. It's an amendment that gives dangerous new protectionist powers to the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, the proximate cause of the global Great Depression, which after all these years is still on the books. Democrats—all but five of whom voted in favor of the bill last week—would do well to remember that in 1932 Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran as a free-trader, pledging to lower Smoot-Hawley's tariff walls. The 99 Republicans who voted aye should know that Herbert Hoover's name lives in infamy for erecting them. Instead, Wednesday's vote was a bipartisan move to build those walls higher using currencies as the bricks and mortar....
Both issues—extending today's low tax rates, and protectionism against China—are animated by the coming election. Once that has passed, presumably cooler heads on both sides of the aisle will prevail, and these twin threats to our fragile economic recovery will fade away.
But sometimes such things can take on lives of their own. And sometimes in the heat of politics cooler heads do not prevail. If that happens now with issues as critical as these, then the economy and the stock market will be doomed to repeat the tragedies of the 1930s.