What you're not hearing about the lethal contradictions in Trump's tariffs

The Supreme Court will strike down the IEEPA tariffs, but Trump will come back with other tariffs under other laws. They will be smaller and less capricious, but they will fail because of three contradictions inevitably embedded in Trump's own claims for them. One, if tariffs are indeed a tax on other countries, then American consumers won't feel the tariffs and change their behavior, so manufacturing will not be re-shored. Two, if Americans pay the tariffs, then behavior will change and there will be reshoring, but no tax revenues for the Treasury. Three, tariffs only work by making cheap exports effectively more expensive, which means domestic manufacturers can sell in America at higher prices. That is both a price shock and a supply shock, risking inflation and recession. Trade deals can't be done so that other countries will buy more American manufactured goods, because their high prices -- without which they cannot operate, and enabled only by our tariffs -- make American goods uncompetitive in the global arena.