Paul Krugman: ‘Tariffs Are Almost Never the Right Answer’

EXCERPT:

KRUGMAN: "Well, you know, the textbook economics — I should know, I’ve written a couple of textbooks there — says that actually, tariffs are almost never the right answer. If you want to promote U.S. manufacturing, promote U.S. manufacturing. Have an industrial policy that subsidizes it, that tries to push it forward, which the Biden Administration did, not maybe on a sufficient scale, but they certainly did quite a lot of that. Tariffs are a very blunt instrument. And, you know, in reality, sometimes there’s no alternative. Certainly the politics of a tariff are a lot easier than the politics of a subsidy, which is why U.S. law does give some discretionary authority to impose tariffs to protect national security, to deal with sudden surges of imports, but they really should be used very sparingly.”