The Germans did Smoot-Hawley x 1000 and became the first nation to recover from the great depression. Italy wasn’t involved in global trade at all and really never was affected by the great depression. A nation like the US who had a huge trade surplus was going to get pounded as other nations went to self-contained economies.
But but Free Traitors™ tell us tariffs NEVER work.
“A nation like the US who had a huge trade surplus was going to get pounded “
I hope the Chinese see their situation is much like that of the US back then. Trade wars would be disastrous for them, and could be avoided by small cooperation now.
Trade wars always hurt the country with the trade surplus. That is why China is trembling right now in anticipation of Trump. They are lobbying every media and junk think tank to propound “free trade” that is actually one-sided rather than free. They are subsidizing their producers via VAT credits and penalizing our producers by adding VAT taxes. That is on top of any duties and tariffs they have on specific goods.
China can avoid Trump’s resorting to tariffs by just leveling the playing field — stop issuing VAT credits on their exports and stop adding VAT and duties onto our goods, and stop manipulating their currency. If they are not going to do that, then tariffs are the only tool we have to compensate for the unfairness of those policies. Collecting those tariffs and using the revenue to offset the VAT on our exports would level the playing field and balance what China and the EU are doing to us.