You ever tried to reason with a dog? It's not easy. You can explain that the dog is doing the wrong thing; you can show the dog charts and graphs. Odds are, the dog will just keep on being a dumb oil' dog.
In related news, on Wednesday Donald Trump tried to crash the global economy with tariffs. It is hard to grasp just how historically, world alteringly stupid this is.
“There has certainly been no piece of trade policy in my lifetime that is at this level of stupidity, right?” said Rob Gillezeau, an assistant professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto. “It's not grounded in anything intelligent. Like, they're kind of just like ignoring economics altogether.”
“I think I can obviously come up with things that have happened in other countries ( that are dumber),” says Joseph Steinberg, an assistant professor of economics at the U of T who specializes in international economics, including trade. “I mean, you know, the policy trajectory that North Korea chose after the Korean War.” He also mentioned Argentina's self inflicted economic crisis in the late 1800s that caused that nation to stagnate for more than 100 years.
“I struggle to think of anything worse,” says Kevin Milligan, the director of the school of economics at the University of British Columbia.
Oh, it's read the entrails dumb, but let's try to spell it out: The White House announced tariffs because Trump thinks a trade deficit is a subsidy, which is like saying that if you buy a wheelbarrow from Home Hardware, you are subsidizing Home Hardware. Trump said the Great Depression never would have happened if the U. S. had stuck with tariff based policy, though the Smoot Hawley tariffs famously helped worsen the Great Depression.
“People have made comparisons to the Smoot Hawley tariffs, which were also bad, but this tariff jump is higher, and the U.S. is three times as trade exposed now as they were in 1932,” says Milligan.
“We have lots of bad economic policy in the world, but we've never seen anything this amateur or purposely destructive at the national level from a G7 economy,” says Gillezeau. “I think that there are pretty reasonable odds they cast themselves into another Great Depression, right?”
Basically, if Brexit was a form of economic suicide, Trump's tariffs are more of a semi random murder suicide. Trump's functionaries appear to have copied and pasted a list of tariff targets from the CIA Factbook, which is how you wind up applying tariffs to an uninhabited island near Antarctica populated by penguins, French territories which export small amounts of lobster and which are now tariffed at 99 per cent, and an island which only houses a U. K. and U. S. military base.
They appear to have calculated the tariffs by taking each nation's trade deficit and dividing it by the nation's exports to the United States, which isn't how anything works. When this was pointed out, a White House deputy press secretary disputed that and offered a mathematical formula that had only added two Greek letters to a formula that, uh, divided the trade deficit by exports to the United States.
The markets dove, inflation is predicted to spike, global currencies gained against the U. S. dollar — including the Canadian dollar — and recession risk is rising fast. It's exactly what you would expect if you handed the world's biggest economy to the most dimwitted cranks on Earth.
And it might be a glimpse of Canada's best hope. Some prominent Canadians seemed to think that since Canada wasn't given additional tariffs Wednesday, the tariff threat has passed and the talk of annexation is over. This is remarkably vapid naiveté. Canada's position remains terribly precarious, jammed between Russia and this version of the United States.
What these tariffs do show is the blunt force stupidity and madness of Trump and MAGA could help Canada. It's also what makes matters so precarious, of course: Trump could send the military into Canada on a whim, for instance, without an appropriate fear of international condemnation, or of the Canadian resistance involved.
But Trump's sheer backwards overreach offers an opening. Tariffs against the world — with the exception of Russia, North Korea, Cuba and Belarus — give other nations added incentive to build trade networks with non American markets, Canada hopefully included. The popular resistance to the effects of this black hole of gawping idiocy should also slow Trump: as Milligan notes, one byproduct of tariffs on Southeastern Asian countries will be higher prices for clothing and shoes, which will especially impact lower income Americans. If Trump stays the course, a blinkered American public might actually realize what's happening.
“After the Smoot Hawley tariffs were enacted, the political parties that were in power and implemented those changes essentially lost power in the United States for an entire generation afterwards,” says Steinberg. “It does present an opportunity for the rest of the world to do something different.”
That's what Canada needs, all right. The United States is in its golden age of stupid. Now's our chance to be smart.
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