Finance & economics | The other wall

How America learned to love tariffs

Protectionism hasn’t been this respectable for decades

Illustration of an arm barrier with a booth next to it, the booth is a claw machine which has shipping containers inside that are being lifted over a fence
Illustration: Mike Haddad
|Washington, dc

ALTHOUGH HIS bill has no chance of becoming law, Jared Golden, a congressman from Maine, delivered an important message last month when he introduced legislation to impose a 10% tariff on all imports into America. It is not just that Mr Golden is the author of the first formal attempt to act on Donald Trump’s proposal for a universal tariff. It is that Mr Golden is a Democrat. His bill is an indication of how tariffs, long seen as an obsolete tool of economic policy, have gained respectability across much of the political spectrum in America.

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This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “How America learned to love tariffs”

From the October 12th 2024 edition

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