Smoot Hawley merely raised tariffs from 30 % to 50% or more, and the Depression began far before it passed.
However, the premise, that raising taxes and worse, injecting uncertainty into a consumer driven economy is possibly the worst situation imaginable.
Yes you are right.. but at that time.. this was actually a fairly small tax on the economy vs. the real impact of ObamaCare. ObamaCare hits us right between the eyes. For families making more than 59,000 this is the conversion of a benefit to a tax.
Worse, this crap is funded by the twin frauds of cutting Medicare (Not happening) and taxing mega-health plans which will disappear immediately after the tax is passed. So none of this funding will occur. But, the law doesn't go away just because the funding doesn't materialize. So a general tax will have to be imposed then to pay for the cost of the Program. The Democrats are betting this will be someone elses problem as the COSTS start in 2014. So, instead, any taxes collected by this monstrosity will actually go to fund more spending between now and 2014.
Smoot, and family had interest in sheep, wool, wool mills and finished wool products. He was interested in keeping out imports that undercut his families companies.
Because of Smoot-Hawley world trade collapsed, no one could know if they could export because their price was no longer clearly just shipping costs, but political costs, so yet another leg was pulled out from under the worlds economy.
More jobs were lost then saved.
Smoot a Republican, like Hoover, and FDR all tried to keep labor and material prices high. Higher than people could afford. This really impacted the poorer working class, driving them into the arms of the FDR welfare state, and which leftist, socialist Democrat have been, as they always are of lefty, RINO Republicans for smoothing the socialist path for them.
By the way, Smoot was a Mormon, kind of like how Mitt Romney, a lefty RINO smoothed the path for ObamaCare.
As the Democrats say, “RINO’s, we can’t do it with out them!”