Colin Grabow at Cato:

Most notably, a US International Trade Commission report that examined the tariffs … found that duties on steel and aluminum led to the protected industries (e.g., US steel mills) increasing their output by an average of $2.8 billion ($1.5 billion for steel and $1.3 billion for aluminum) per year, certain industries subject to higher steel and aluminum costs saw their annual output decline by an average of $3.4 billion.

As my colleagues Clark Packard and Scott Lincicome wrote on this blog in August, more than a dozen studies by university economists, think tanks, and government agencies have examined these tariffs and have found other economic harms. The general consensus: “Americans faced significant losses from the tariffs (and inevitable foreign retaliation), including higher tax burdens and prices, loss in wages and employment, reduced consumption, decreased investment, a decline in exports, and overall aggregate welfare.”

 

The benefits of free trade and the costs of tariffs remain straightforward, rooted in compelling economic logic, and supported by piles of empirical research. Tariffs’ net economic harms are one of the few issues on which almost all economists — left, right, and center — agree. Raising costs and introducing barriers to the efficient production of goods — and inviting other countries to respond in kind — will harm American consumers and businesses and ultimately harm the US economy overall. Try as protectionists might to prove otherwise, protectionism remains an economic loser, and no amount of alchemy will change that fact.