Opinion | The Paranoid Style in Tariff Policy (2024)

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June 18, 2024, 2:37 p.m. ET

Farah Stockman

Editorial Board Member

Biden Courts Some Liberal Love on Immigration

Two weeks after President Biden abruptly cracked down on asylum seekers at the southern border — angering some progressives — he announced a new program on Tuesday to protect from deportation the undocumented spouses and stepchildren of American citizens.

In a certain way, it is a no-brainer. The undocumented spouses of American citizens are already eligible for citizenship, but were required to leave the country to apply for a green card, a process that can take years. That’s especially true for people who slipped across the border — rather than overstayed a visa — since they could be barred from re-entry for up to 10 years. Now they will be able to apply from the United States and work legally while they wait.

For about half a million American families, this is a game changer. It is being compared to DACA, which created a special legal status for people who were brought into the United States by their parents. But it is not quite the clear case that DACA was. Kids who were brought into the country illegally by their parents committed no crime and shouldn’t have to face the same consequences as adults who came by their own volition.

You don’t have to be a raging ideologue to believe that there should be consequences for breaking the law. Plenty of Democrats feel that people who sneak across the border or overstay a visa should be required to make amends, even if that just means paying a civil fine. That’s one reason Biden’s permissive policies on immigration are endangering his bid for re-election.

But the move to protect undocumented spouses is politically savvy. It’s a family-oriented policy that makes a priority of the needs of American citizens, unlike those of his policies that allowed nearly two million asylum seekers into the country in recent years.

Despite the fever dream of conspiracy theorists, they can’t cast a ballot to thank him.

June 18, 2024, 11:12 a.m. ET

Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

The Paranoid Style in Tariff Policy

A few days ago Donald Trump floated a truly terrible, indeed unworkable economic proposal. I’m aware that many readers will say, “So what else is new?” But in so doing, you’re letting Trump benefit from the soft bigotry of rock-bottom expectations, not holding him to the standards that should apply to any presidential candidate. A politician shouldn’t be given a pass on nonsense because he talks nonsense all the time.

But in a way the most interesting thing about Trump’s latest awful policy idea is the way his party responded, with the kind of obsequiousness and paranoia you normally expect in places like North Korea.

What Trump reportedly proposed was an “all tariff policy” in which taxes on imports replace income taxes. Why is that a bad idea?

First, the math doesn’t work. Annual income tax receipts are around $2.4 trillion; imports are around $3.9 trillion. On the face of it, this might seem to suggest that Trump’s idea would require an average tariff rate of around 60 percent. But high tariffs would reduce imports, so tariff rates would have to go even higher to realize the same amount of revenue, which would reduce imports even more, and so on. How high would tariffs have to go in the end? I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation using highly Trump-favorable assumptions and came up with a tariff rate of 133 percent; in reality, there’s probably no tariff rate high enough to replace the income tax.

And to the extent that we did replace income taxes with tariffs, we’d in effect sharply raise taxes on working-class Americans while giving the rich a big tax cut — because the income tax is fairly progressive, falling most heavily on affluent taxpayers, while tariffs are de facto a kind of sales tax that falls most heavily on the working class.

So this is a really bad idea that would be highly unpopular if voters knew about it.

But here’s the kicker: How did the Republican National Committee respond when asked about it? By having its representative declare, “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.”

Now, economists have been saying that tariffs are a tax on domestic consumers for the past two centuries or so; I guess they’ve been working for China all along. Yes, there are exceptions and qualifications, but if you imagine that Trump is thinking about optimal tariff theory, I have a degree from Trump University you might want to buy.

Anyway, look at how the R.N.C. responded to a substantive policy question: by insisting not just that Dear Leader’s nonsense is true, but that anyone who disagrees is part of a sinister conspiracy.

Don’t brush this off. It’s one more piece of evidence that MAGA has become a dangerous cult.

Better to Close the Israeli War Cabinet Than Let the Extremists In

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By all accounts, the real reason Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel dissolved his “war cabinet” — the small decision-making body he established soon after the Hamas attacks that led Israel to go to war in Gaza — was to prevent the far-right hawks in his government from getting close to strategic military decisions.

Keeping Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich as far away from military operations as possible is good. They are dangerous nationalists and would do what they could to make the war even more horrific. How things came to this is a sad reflection of the way political maneuvering has played into this extraordinarily cruel war.

The war cabinet was effectively finished before Netanyahu announced its formal dissolution on Monday. The two centrist opposition leaders he brought in to broaden support for the war effort, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot — both former military chiefs of staff with solid security credentials — had quit a week earlier, angry that crucial decisions were being blocked by “political considerations.” That brought the extremists knocking at the door, compelling Netanyahu to close down the war cabinet rather than let them in, and to rely on a clutch of close advisers in handling the war.

The problem is that Netanyahu’s idea of handling the war is to juggle pressures for a cease-fire from Israeli centrists and the Biden administration against threats from the far-right zealots to quit his government if he calls a cease-fire. Without the right his government would fall, probably pushing Netanyahu out of office — a development that would satisfy a majority of Israelis but leave Netanyahu exposed to the corruption charges that have been dogging him for years.

The specific issue that drove Gantz and Eisenkot to quit the war cabinet was procrastination on the cease-fire proposal that President Biden announced on May 31. Biden had presented the three-stage plan, which included release of all remaining Israeli hostages, as an Israeli proposal, which required only agreement from Hamas to go into effect. But Netanyahu never publicly acknowledged ownership or agreement, and Hamas came back with conditions that Israel rejected. The Biden administration then upped the ante by taking the plan to the U.N. Security Council, where it passed with only Russia abstaining.

The administration remains outwardly sanguine about the cease-fire. But aside from the political hurdles on the Israeli side, predicting or obtaining a response from Hamas has been onerous. Negotiations for the movement are handled by Hamas political operatives in Doha, Qatar, but the final word is with the Hamas chief in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, the author of the murderous raid on Israel on Oct. 7. Communications with Sinwar are painfully slow, as he takes huge precautions not to give away his whereabouts in Gaza. He also knows that the remaining Israeli hostages are his only bargaining chip, and he is in no rush to cash them in.

That is the maddening reality of this war: Leaders on both sides keep it going even when the best interests of their people so clearly demand its immediate end.

June 17, 2024, 5:57 p.m. ET

Patrick Healy

Deputy Opinion Editor

The Tony Award I Wish I Could Give

I first saw the director Maria Friedman’s production of “Merrily We Roll Along” in London in 2013 and felt I was witnessing some kind of miracle. Here was a revival of an unusual kind of Broadway legend — a musical regarded as brilliant and ambitious but, ultimately, perhaps fatally flawed because of an unsympathetic central character and a plot whose reverse chronology kept you from being swept up and away by the heart of the show (the friendship of the three core characters).

What Friedman pulled off was extraordinary. Nothing a director does is more important than choosing the right cast, and Friedman’s work with the actor Mark Umbers turned the selfish, shallow Franklin Shepard Jr. into a man who craved connection but ended in heartbreak — an achievement that owed much to her casting of Damian Humbley and Jenna Russell as Frank’s friends Charley and Mary and the intimacy and chemistry among the three performers.

Friedman, who is an acclaimed actress in her own right, stayed with “Merrily” for years, mounting a version in Boston and then, to enormous acclaim, an Off Broadway production in 2023 that moved to Broadway last fall, 42 years after the initial Broadway production closed after only 16 regular performances. Her “Merrily” won the Tony Award for best musical revival on Sunday night, as well as Tonys for two of its sensational stars, Jonathan Groff as Frank and Daniel Radcliffe as Charley.

Groff, Radcliffe and their co-star Lindsay Mendez created a bond of such affection and understanding that their trio of performances will stay in my memory for a long time.

In a surprise, Friedman didn’t win the Tony for best director of a musical on Sunday; that honor went to Danya Taymor, who did excellent work on “The Outsiders.”

Yet later in the Tony ceremony, when “Merrily” won for best musical revival, one of the show’s lead producers, Sonia Friedman — who is the director’s sister and a legend in her own right — heaped praise on her sibling and tried to hand her Tony to her. Maria Friedman gently pushed the Tony away and then gave a loving tribute to the show and its creators, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth.

“Well, Steve and George, ‘Merrily’s’ popular,” she said.

It was a class-act performance. If I could come up with a new Tony category and give the award, it would be to an artist who kept working and working on a puzzle of a show and its casting until she created a version for the ages, and that award would go to Maria Friedman for “Merrily.”

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June 17, 2024, 11:07 a.m. ET

Pamela Paul

Opinion Columnist

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A Warning on Social Media Is the Very Least We Can Do

You’re in the middle of a public health emergency involving a dangerously addictive substance — let’s say an epidemic of fentanyl or vaping among teens. Which of the following is the best response?

1. Issue a warning. Tell everyone, “Hey, watch out — this stuff isn’t good for you.”

2. Regulate the dangerous substance so that it causes the least amount of harm.

3. Ban the substance and penalize anyone who distributes it.

In the midst of a well-documented mental health crisis among children and teenagers, with social media use a clear contributing factor, the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, recommends choice one. As he wrote in a Times Opinion guest essay on Monday, “It is time to require a surgeon general’s warning label on social media platforms, stating that social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents.”

It’s an excellent first step, but it’s a mere Band-Aid on a suppurating wound. Telling teenagers something is bad for them may work for some kids, but for others it’s practically an open invitation to abuse. To add muscle to a mere label, we need to prohibit its sale to people under 18 and enforce the law on sellers. We need to strongly regulate social media, as Europe has begun to do, and ban it for kids under 16. Murthy urges Congress to take similar steps.

Free-speech absolutists (or those who play the role when a law restricts something that earns them lots of money) will say that requiring age verification systems is an unconstitutional limit on free speech. Nonsense. We don’t allow children to freely attend PG-13 or R-rated movies. We don’t allow hard liquor to be advertised during children’s programming.

Other objections to regulation are that it’s difficult to carry out (so are many things) and that there’s only a correlative link between social media and adverse mental health rather than one of causation.

Complacency is easy. The hard truth is that many people are too addicted to social media themselves to fight for laws that would unstick their kids. Big Tech, with Congress in its pocket, is only too happy for everyone to keep their heads in the sand and reap the benefits. But a combination of Options 2 and 3 are the only ones that will bring real results.

A correction was made on

June 17, 2024

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the surgeon general. He is Dr. Vivek Murthy, not Murphy.

How we handle corrections

June 17, 2024, 5:05 a.m. ET