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Laffer is wrong Smoot-Hawley had almost no effect on the US economy. Import Exports were only 5% of GDP at the time. You can be against trade tariffs but have a real reason and not the Smoot-Hawley myth.

Imports during 1929 were only 4.2% of the United States' GNP and exports were only 5.0%. Monetarists, such as Milton Friedman, who emphasize the central role of the money supply in causing the depression, note that the Smoot-Hawley Act only had a contributory effect on the entire U.S. economy.[22]

---wiki

The Smoot-Hawley tariff was simply too small a policy change to have so large an effect as triggering a Depression. For a start, it only applied to about one-third of America's trade: about 1.3 percent of our GDP. One point three percent! America's average tariff on goods subject to tariff went from 44.6 to 53.2 percent--not a very big jump at all. America's tariffs were higher in almost every year from 1821 to 1914. Our tariffs went up in 1861, 1864, 1890, and 1922 without producing global depressions, and the great recessions of 1873 and 1893 spread worldwide without needing the help of any tariff increases.

---Ian Fletcher

Bernanke’s doctoral dissertation identified what Fischer already had: that the Depression was the result of the Reserve Board restricting the money supply at exactly the moment when it needed to expand it radically.

His solution was what earned him the name “Helicopter Ben”.

And that’s what has been done since late 2008. Massive money printing with ever lower interest rates, which Bernanke engineered by going where no one had gone before: the Fed buying it’s own debt.

It worked to a point. Here on the West Coast we are back in the bubble. How long will it last? Hard to say. Reinflation is like that...but the debt is still there.

But one thing we do know is that trade tariffs were a footnote to the actions of the Reserve bank. Regardless of how you feel about a currency based on debt issuance, what was done by Bernanke was the correct thing to do in such a system. And had they done it in 1932, the Depression would not have gotten as bad as it was.

From Romer and Hsieh:

“In their classic study, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz argue that the Federal Reserve allowed the money supply to plummet because of ineptitude and poor leadership”

That was the case. We are in a monetary system governed by complex non-linear dynamics and slow witted dopes who worked as bank managers had no clue about the nature of those dynamics.

And Smoot-Hawley was just an excuse for them concocted by the Northeastern money establishment to cover for their mistakes.