Daily Monitor
Sunday March 14 2021
Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump raised US tariffs on imports from China several times, from an average of about 3 per cent when he took office in January 2017 to more than 20 per cent by the end of 2019.
As a result, the current average US tariff on Chinese goods is essentially at the same level that the US imposed on the rest of the world in the early 1930s under the Smoot-Hawley Act, a protectionist measure that many economists blame for the severity of the Great Depression.
Now that president Joe Biden is reversing many of Trump’s policies, including import tariffs on European goods, he has to decide whether to rescind his predecessor’s China tariffs, too.