In the January 2025 issue of Reason, we’re giving performance reviews of Joe Biden’s presidency. Click here to read the other entries.
While he was interviewing for the job, President Joe Biden demonstrated an acute awareness of how tariffs work. It’s worrisome that he seems to have forgotten that—or, worse, chosen to ignore it—since he’s been president.
In June 2019, Biden correctly described the effects of higher taxes on imports. Donald Trump, who was president at the time, “doesn’t get the basics,” Biden said. “He thinks tariffs are being paid by China. Any beginning econ student…could tell you the American people are paying his tariffs.” Around the same time, he criticized Trump’s reliance on tariffs as a tool of foreign policy, saying that higher taxes on Americans was a “shortsighted” way to combat China’s “abuses.” In place of his predecessor’s zero-sum view on trade, Biden advocated for a “united front of allies” to take on China while opening up other markets.
Biden’s résumé seemed to confirm he had a firm grasp of trade policy. As a member of the Senate in the 1990s, Biden supported the North American Free Trade Agreement. During his time as vice president (2009–2017), Biden helped organize the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a planned-but-never-implemented 12-nation trade deal that would have lowered tariffs, increased American access to foreign goods, and boosted the economic fortunes of those other nations. The deal was also widely seen as a way to put pressure on China, which would not have been a member.
Trump blew up the TPP when he took office in 2017. Disappointingly, Biden not only failed to bring it back; he also failed to undo Trump’s tariff hikes.
Then Biden started adding to them. In May 2024, the Biden administration announced new tariffs on steel, aluminum, semiconductors, electric vehicles (and the batteries used to power them), and other goods from China. In July, he hiked tariffs on some steel imported from Mexico to block steel from China that might be imported via America’s southerly neighbor.
It remains true that any freshman econ student could tell Biden who would pay the cost of those tariffs. If the president needed more convincing, he could have reviewed any of the several studies published in recent years showing that Americans paid for Trump’s tariff hikes.
Those decisions made little economic sense and contradicted Biden’s longtime record as an advocate for lowering trade barriers. They also demonstrated questionable political judgment. The president touts his bipartisan infrastructure bill as one of his top accomplishments—but insisting on Buy American policies and heightening other trade barriers means higher costs for taxpayer-funded construction projects.
Similarly, Biden pushed for a bill to help Americans afford electric vehicles, then approved tariffs to make those same cars more expensive, if they are imported from China.
At best, Biden’s trade policy exhibits confusion and incoherence. At worst, he appears to be endorsing policies that he knows(or once knew) would not be in America’s interest.
Trade policy performance review: unacceptable; should review freshman economics
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “Trade Policy Amnesia.”
