Trump’s trade war promises echo his bankrupt business past | PennLive letters

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump repeatedly promised that tariffs would not raise prices. Now that he has unleashed a global trade war (and tanked the U.S. stock market) with irrationally broad tariffs, Republican defenders say that prices will rise now, but that it will be worth it in the long run – like the inconvenience one suffers when remodeling a kitchen, for the sake of a nicer home.

This analogy might be more believable if the “contractor” – in this case, Donald Trump – had not previously declared bankruptcy for his companies six times.

It might be more believable if all the “minor inconveniences” were related to things that tariffs could actually fix. Jacking up prices on coffee and chocolate, say, is simply not going to bring coffee-growing and cocoa-growing jobs here.

And it might be more believable if the only other time this nation imposed such sudden tariffs on this scale – the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff – had alleviated the Great Depression, rather than made it worse. (Democrat Franklin Roosevelt had to rebuild global trade and the U.S. economy after that fiasco.)

Robert Shaffer, Mechanicsburg, Pa.