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Elizabeth McKillen is a professor emerita of history at the University of Maine.
Mainers who are still undecided about the 2024 presidential election and are trying to weigh the relative strength and weaknesses of Republican and Democratic economic programs should especially consider Donald Trump’s proposals to increase tariffs on most imported goods by 10 to 20 percent and on Chinese products by 60 percent.
In defending his proposals, Trump has argued that higher tariffs, which are taxes on imports, can give a competitive advantage to American products and bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. He has repeatedly insisted that tariff taxes are paid by foreign countries and will not harm consumers.
Experts, however, have decried Trump as “economically illiterate” for failing to understand that taxes on imports are usually paid by the businesses that are importing the goods, ranging from large companies like Amazon and Target, to small mom and pop stores that cater to immigrant communities. These businesses then pass on the costs to their customers, thereby increasing inflation. High tariffs can also cause collateral damage by encouraging other countries to boycott American exports or impose other retaliatory measures.
Mainers and residents of predominantly rural states were particularly hurt by the high tariffs imposed by Trump during his first administration because they encouraged other countries to boycott or impose retaliatory tariffs on American agricultural and seafood products.
Maine’s lobster exports to China and Europe dropped by about 50 percent in 2020, during the Trump presidency, due to American tariffs and Maine blueberry farmers faced a devastating loss of export markets when China imposed an 80 percent tariff on frozen wild blueberries in response to U.S. tariff increases. In the Midwest, corn and soybean prices also declined due to a contraction in overseas markets caused by trade wars. Many Midwest farmers survived only because the federal government offered extensive and expensive subsidies to compensate them for their losses. These subsidies were not extended to Maine blueberry farmers.
Trump has often boasted that he created the “greatest economy in the history of the world,” and that his economic policies improved the lives of American workers and farmers far more than those of the Biden/Harris administration. Economic data, however, suggests that while inflation was higher under Joe Biden, job, wage, and GDP growth were also greater.
Although Biden maintained some of Trump’s tariffs against the Chinese, and in a few cases increased them, his approach to tariffs has generally been more targeted and pursued in cooperation with Western European allies. Biden has also sought to use domestic subsidies to encourage investments in the manufacture of high-tech goods and the building of a green economy infrastructure in the United States, thereby lessening U.S. dependence on Chinese goods and creating more well-paying U.S. jobs.
Kamala Harris would likely continue Biden’s more targeted approach to tariffs and has argued that Trump’s tariff proposals would dramatically increase inflation.
Although Trump has dismissed Harris’s plans for curbing inflation by outlawing price gouging as “communist price controls,” 37 states already have price gouging laws. State attorneys’ offices, including those led by Republicans, have often prosecuted companies for the practice. Harris’s policies aimed at stopping price gouging seem more likely, in combination with her other economic proposals, to reduce inflation and to benefit residents of rural states than Trump’s high tariff policies or tax cuts for the wealthy.
