Former President Donald Trump has pledged to slap all imported goods with tariffs of at least 10 percent should he win a second term in the White House.
But Ernie Techeschi, the Director of Economics at the Yale Budget Lab, writes on X that Trump would put the United States in some inauspicious company were he to follow through on his across-the-board tariff threat.
"No advanced economy currently has a weighted average tariff of 10 percent or above, as Trump is proposing (he recently said it could go as high as 20 percent)," he notes. "It simply is not a global norm. Here's a list from the World Bank of countries that do. The list, fair to say, speaks for itself."
In fact, the list of countries with tariffs exceeding 10 percent doesn't include any nation that could be remotely called an economic powerhouse, and instead includes nations such as Chad, Iran, Belize, and Venezuela.
The latter country's inclusion is particularly ironic given how Trump has repeatedly warned his followers that electing any Democrat to the presidency would turn the United States into Venezuela, despite the fact that a Democratic president right now is overseeing 4 percent unemployment, 3 percent inflation and a record stock market.
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Tedeschi also said that it would be a mistake to compare the kinds of tariffs that Trump wants to impose with European-style value-added taxes, as he believes that tariffs would be more punishing for American consumers.
"The base of a tariff does include consumption of imported goods, and consumers definitely feel the burden; it also includes imported investment and intermediate inputs," he added. "VATs are broader consumption taxes. I'm not aware of any country's VAT regime that started its life as a tariff."
