Jerry Miskulin – 6/5/08

This page was last updated on June 7, 2008.

Bring back the tariff; Jerry Miskulin; Beaver County Times; June 5, 2008.

I encourage you to review Mr. Miskulin’s body of work in the archives. Mr. Miskulin has written at least 19 letters since 2004 (I didn’t critique all of them.). Most (all?) are illogical (not just wrong) and full of falsehoods.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.

“In lieu of what’s happening today, you have to say the one thing that made the United States great was the tariff.”

[RWC] Mr. Miskulin was five years behind me at Center High School. Though you can’t tell it based on this letter, I believe economics and history were still taught at CHS through 1975. Among other things, protectionist tariffs via the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 worsened the Great Depression when our trading partners retaliated by implementing their own protectionist tariffs. Folks like Mr. Miskulin seem to forget tariffs work both ways. If you want to export products and services to other countries, you can’t stop those countries from doing business here.

“The tariffs of the 19th and 20th centuries may have had their inherent evils, but they were nothing like the borrowing we are doing to make up for the current trade imbalance.”

[RWC] Government borrowing has nothing to do with a trade imbalance. Government borrowing is the result of spending more than the government collects in taxes.

“The tariffs brought out the best in people whereas free trade brings out the worst in people. If it isn’t strengthening repressive regimes or moving jobs overseas where we become players in those regimes, free trade brings economics to the foreground at the expense of politics and social concerns.”

[RWC] Protectionism brings “out the best in people?” One surefire way to put the U.S. in the ashbin of history is to elevate “politics and social concerns” over economics. All have a role, but a country without a robust economy is headed in reverse.