July 24, 2018

Trump Comes to Bury Tariffs, Not Praise Them

Andrew Cullen

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L-a-a-a-a-dies and gentlemen, your attention please. I am about to attempt a death-defying stunt THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER ATTEMPTED BEFORE. I am going to defend Donald Trump’s tariff policy.

Are you ready? (Cracks knuckles.) As you know, tariffs are bad. All the finest economists say so. BUT. There’s one generally tolerated exception to this rule: If another country has indefensibly high tariffs, and the sole purpose of your tariff is to cause them enough pain to force them to reduce their tariffs, then it’s OK. If you’re successful, then everyone’s tariffs go down and the world is better off.

But this can take a while, and in the meantime your own people can suffer. So today President Trump announced a plan to help our farmers who are hurt by the tariffs we imposed on China. The general reaction to this was mockery:

But if the purpose of the tariffs is to force China to reduce its tariffs; and if we know this will take a while; and if we know that domestic resistance to sustained economic pain is our biggest obstacle to seeing this through—then it makes sense to stand tough on the tariffs but assuage domestic resistance with random payouts here and there. And that’s what Trump is doing.

If you think the tariff war is dumb in the first place, then the payoff to farmers is dumb on top of dumb. But if you support the tariff war as a way of getting China to open its economy more, than the payoff to American farmers makes perfect sense. It’s just a way of bribing people to allow a good but painful policy to run its course.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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