Leah Millis | Reuters
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced a new round of global tariffs, instituting a minimum 10% levy on goods imported from countries around the world, which he said he hopes will strengthen the U.S. economy and remedy what he calls “unfair trade practices.”
In his remarks on Wednesday, Trump said the Great Depression “would have never happened” if the U.S. maintained a strong tariff policy at the time. The government later “tried to bring back tariffs to save our country, but it was gone,” he added.
However, those statements are untrue, said Dean Baker, senior economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
“We had not ended tariffs before the Great Depression,” he said. “There was a modest lowering, and that occurred decades earlier.”
Congress did pass the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, which increased tariffs to try to boost federal revenue and end the Depression, but historians and economists widely agree the act had the opposite effect: It deepened the rout and raised prices.
“I have literally never heard anyone suggest [a lack of tariffs caused the Depression] and can’t even imagine how it would have worked,” Baker said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Historians point to a number of contributing factors that led to the Great Depression. Those include the stock market crashing in 1929 due to factors like overproduction in certain industries...
Being falsely accused of setting fire in the Amazon with funds from an Oscar-winning actor eventually became a blessing in disguise for Caetano Scannavino, the founder of a nonprofit organisation ...