Among the few episodes of national history that Americans know is the
one that goes by the name of Boston Tea Party, which recalls thepolitical protest against British taxation, carried out by the colonists
of Boston on December 16, 1773. On that occasion, some of them, dressed
as Mohawks (American Indians), threw 342 cases of tea into the waters of
Boston harbor. Donald Trump has internalized this event and thinks of
using customs duties as a panacea to resolve the disastrous trade
imbalance of the state he governs. Obviously the problem is more complex
and the causes of the deficit accumulated by the United States between
imports and exports have structural causes.
The US economy, like the European one, at least since the early 1970s,
has implemented productive decentralization to cope with the growth in
labor costs and to obtain greater profits from investments and
production activities. To this end, the United States industry has moved
production activities to both Canada and Mexico, but even more
frequently to China and other countries in the world in search of
lower-cost production locations, creating transnational production
chains, reserving for itself the assembly activity of individual
components in the widespread factory around the world to produce the
finished product, and finally managing its marketing.
Over time, this has led to the shifting of manufacturing activities to
those sites and countries where profit margins were higher and at the
same time has produced a progressive and growing impoverishment of
workers in the United States, to the point that the manufacturing
activity of what was the largest factory in the world has significantly
reduced or in any case has concentrated on low-labor and high-tech
production segments, drastically lowering the employment rate. Today,
the United States is characterized by the presence of many
deindustrialized areas, to the point that we speak of rust districts,
thus referring to the areas that host industrial plants that are now
abandoned and decaying. In parallel with the decay and dilapidation of
the plants, the working class has disappeared and both the working
conditions and the job opportunities of many layers of once specialized
workers have deteriorated, to the point that the old industrialized
areas suffer from situations of absolute poverty experienced by
populations of former white workers, as effectively described by the
vice president in his successful book J. D. Vance, American Elegy,
Garzanti, Milan, 2020.
Trump's goals
The United States recorded a trade deficit of 131.4 billion USD in
January 2025. The United States trade balance is expected to be 75,000
billion US dollars at the end of this quarter, according to global
macroeconomic models of Trading Economics and analysts' expectations.
The deficit between the US and EE has widened from 170 to 237 billion
dollars. To achieve this goal, Trump plans to operate on several fronts:
on the one hand, he imposes customs duties to protect domestic
production and make goods produced in the United States more
competitive; on the other, he reduces spending with particular attention
to military spending, considering the military presence in Europe a
positional rent for Europe; at the same time, he opens the US territory
to investments, inviting production in the United States, so that the
country's gross domestic product grows, filling the deficit. The request
for Canada to become the fifty-first state of the Union and some form of
integration of Mexico into the American production market goes in the
same direction, so that the entire productivity of the area constitutes
a single mass, together with that of the United States, to contribute to
the rebalancing between imports and exports. This measure is vital for
the American economy, faced with market competition from China, Europe
and the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa),
which have in fact created an alternative market that, despite having a
smaller per capita spending capacity than the European one, is so large
that it compensates for the deficit and at the same time threatens the
economic hegemony of the United States with the prospect of creating an
alternative currency to the dollar, while already carrying out a
significant part of international trade in the national currencies of
individual states. This deprives the dollar of that rent of position on
the world currency market that, thanks to the ever decreasing but still
present dominance, relative to the control of the currency market, has
allowed the United States to unload the cost of inflation and its public
debt onto the world market and allows the American treasury with ever
decreasing freedom to print money.
The increase in duties
Seen in this framework, Trump's trade policy is based on the increase in
customs duties, which are government taxes on goods imported from other
countries. In practice, when a good enters a country, the government
applies a tax on its value, which can vary depending on the type of
product. The main objective of this measure is to protect the national
industry from the competition of a similar cheaper product produced
abroad, but it can also serve as leverage in international negotiations.
The result is the use of so-called "reciprocal duties", dangerous for
various economic and geopolitical reasons because it risks having
counterproductive effects and above all creating more problems than it
solves. This measure is inevitably accompanied by a trade war: if the
United States increases import data, other countries can respond with
similar countermeasures.
This produces a spiral of retaliation, as happened between the United
States and China between 2018 and 2019, which harm each other by
lowering global trade volumes and increasing economic uncertainty.
Another of the inevitable effects is the increase in costs for consumers
and businesses, as higher tariffs mean that consumers will pay more for
goods subject to tariffs. This generates inflation and reduces the
purchasing power of wages, producing social conflict. This triggers a
spiral that produces a negative impact on exports, given that other
countries, to defend themselves, in turn impose tariffs, decreasing
demand, thus affecting both employment and profits.
In such an economic framework, a slowdown in international trade occurs,
which throughout history has always led to a reduction in global
economic growth, causing trade wars that have preceded more general
economic crises and produced conflicts, generating distrust in the
markets, in businesses and undermining economic and social stability. In
general, businesses need a stable framework of reference and
predictability to invest and plan in order to plan their activities.
Trump mistakenly believes that customs duties, which are a tax imposed
on goods imported by a State in order to protect its economy and
industry, strengthen its trade policy. Although they apparently promote
internal production capacities, they actually strengthen inflation and
their effects are passed on to the final consumer with an increase in
the cost of living. In other words, although customs duties may seem
like a quick solution to protect a country's economy, the negative
effects of Trump's trade policy may outweigh what may seem to be
short-term benefits. Rising costs, uncertainty for businesses and the
risk of a trade war are factors that make this protectionist policy
potentially dangerous for the global economy. In an increasingly
interconnected world, it is essential to find solutions that promote
cooperation rather than isolation, in order to guarantee stable and
sustainable economic growth for all.
Trump's choices put to the test by the market
The tariff increases imposed so far by Trump are characterized by
instability in decisions and seem to be aimed at having more of a
deterrent effect, or announcement effect, than real and effective
effectiveness.
The governor of Ontario responded to the increase in US tariffs on
aluminum steel imported from Canada with a 25% increase in the cost of
electricity for four US states, threatening to leave New York in the
dark, and the boastful Trump was forced to quickly backtrack. There is
no doubt that China is preparing to repay the United States with the
same coin, as it has done in the past, proof of which is that it has
reduced imports of soy, food, chickens, also because the United States
has proceeded to exterminate its production capacity in the sheep
sector, not caring to combat a frightening epidemic of avian flu, not
having the veterinary personnel necessary to combat it, fired because it
is considered of no use or in any case has told a sector not under the
jurisdiction of the State.
Rocco Petrone
https://www.ucadi.org/2025/03/21/dazi-doganali-protezione-nazionale-e-isolamento-globale/
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