Earlier this week the Trump administration triumphantly announced that it had scored a big trade deal with Japan. Now the reviews are in, and the deal basically received a 0% score on Rotten Tomatoes. And I’m not talking about the reactions of economists; I’m talking about the reaction from the manufacturing sector, both management and labor, which Trump’s tariffs were supposed to help.Why so negative? I’ll get there shortly. First, let’s talk about the overall state of Trump’s trade war.Under Trump, the United States has taken an amazingly sharp turn toward protectionism. Here’s the long view:Source: Yale Budget LabIn a matter of months, we’ve gone from a regime of very low trade barriers — achieved through generations of hard bargaining in international trade negotiations — to Smoot-Hawley-level tariffs. Many businesses, however, have taken comfort in the belief that extremely high tariffs were temporary, that they’d come back down as Trump
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