Ever since the second election of President Donald Trump all of America (and the world) has had one word on it’s mind: tariffs. President Trump’s economic policy has been aggressively focused on enacting tariffs on much of the world in order to remedy what he claims are unfair trade policies enacted against the United States. The stock market, economy, and other countries quickly responded and what was once an niche economic policy soon became dinner table conversation for millions of individuals around the country. With all the confusion around tariffs and what they mean, it can be enlightening to look at what other business, political, and economic leaders have said about tariffs in the past in order to provide guidance for our future and help better our own individual personal options. Here are 25 of some of the best quotes on tariffs to better understand what other major figures have said on the issue in the past.
1. “If we actually have a trade war, it will be bad for the whole world… a world that adjusts to something very close to free trade. More people will live better [with free trade] than in a world with significant tariffs and shifting tariffs over time.” – Warren Buffet
2. “As we learned after President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff at the outset of the Great Depression, vibrant international trade is a key component to economic recovery; hindering trade is a recipe for disaster.” – Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R – AR)
3. “If you don’t like Chinese economic policy, flooding the market with over production, you could put a sanction on them, or a tariff.” – Scott Bessent
4. “We need a trade policy that is fair to American workers, not just large multi-national corporations… Donald Trump’s haphazard and reckless plan to impose tariffs on Canada and the European Union is an absolute disaster that will cause unnecessary economic pain to farmers, manufacturers and consumers… I strongly support imposing stiff penalties on countries like China, Russia, South Korea and Vietnam to prevent them from illegally dumping steel and aluminum into the U.S. and throughout the world… but not at the expense of farmers, workers, small businesses and consumers in Vermont and throughout this country.” – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I – VT)
5. “I’m a tariff man, standing on a tariff platform.” – President William McKinley
6. “The unrecognized failure of the Trump tariffs approach is that he is depending on big global companies to create manufacturing jobs here… he has completely ignored entrepreneurs and innovators.” – Mark Cuban
7. “I think you need to be careful with tariffs… if a part is suddenly twice as expensive, it messes everything up” – Elon Musk
As you can see, the opinions on tariffs can be complicated and varied, even within the Trump administration and its allies. One of President Trump’s strongest allies in his second administration and the appointed head of The Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.), Elon Musk, has been one of the most vocal critics of tariffs. Lately, he has been getting more and more aggressive in his criticisms as time has gone on even attacking Trump trade advisor, Peter Navarro, viciously on Twitter. As the head of businesses like Tesla, Starlink, and xAI, Musk relies heavily on foreign goods to help keep his costs down to maintain the profits needed to maintain his position as the richest man in the world. Furthermore, Musk has complicated ties to China – a strong target of the Trump tariffs. This just goes to show how many competing interests are at play with complicated topics like the world economy.
8. “The economic effects are a good enough reason to oppose raising tariffs. However, the main reason to oppose tariffs is that tariffs, like all taxes (including the inflation tax), are theft.” – Rep. Ron Paul (R – TX)
9. “Tariffs that save jobs in the steel industry mean higher steel prices, which in turn means fewer sales of American steel products around the world and losses of far more jobs than are saved.” – Thomas Sowell
10. “Trump’s reciprocal tariff doctrine does exactly what the (World Trade Organization) has failed to do: it holds foreign countries accountable.” – Peter Navarro
11. “When countries break the rules, we won’t hesitate to impose targeted tariffs.” – Sen. Hillary Clinton (D – NY)
12. “The benefits of a tariff are visible. Union workers can see they are ‘protected’. The harm which a tariff does is invisible. It’s spread widely. There are people that don’t have jobs because of tariffs but they don’t know it.” – Milton Friedman
13. “We shouldn’t be putting tariffs on anything. That hurts working men and women in US. What we should be doing is making our manufacturing more competitive.” – Sen. Rick Santorum (R – PA)
14. “Remember WE pay the tariffs, not Colombia… Trump is making inflation WORSE for working class Americans, not better.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D – NY)
15. “High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign country and the triggering of fierce trade wars. The result is more and more tariffs. Higher and higher trade barriers and less and less competition. So, soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs, that subsidize inefficiencies and poor management, people stop buying. Then, the worst happens, markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down and millions of people lose their jobs.” – President Ronald Reagan
Interestingly, fellow Republican president and conservative icon Ronald Reagan was notoriously wary of tariffs speaking out extensively against their usage in a 1987 speech during his presidency. Proponents of tariff argue that enacting tariffs can help protect domestic industry and remedy unfair trade imbalances; critics argue it is a tax on consumers, inhibits international business, and acts as a barrier to free trade. As such, tariffs have usually been championed by economic leftists who favor government central planning, populists purporting to protect domestic industry, and nationalists attempting to bring about American exceptionalism. Conversely, it tends to be opposed by importers, libertarians, free-market advocates, and consumers who end up bearing the brunt of any increase in the cost of goods.
16. “There is potential for upside, but there are enormous risks.” – Sen. Ted Cruz (R – TX)
17. “I am in favor of a national bank…in favor of the internal improvements system and a high protective tariff.” – President Abraham Lincoln
18. “Unemployment is likely to go up as the economy slows… in all likelihood, inflation is likely to go up as well.” – Jerome Powell
19. “I want to be clear about what I support and what I don’t: I support using tariffs as a tool against bad actors and trade cheats – like Communist China; I support using tariffs strategically alongside muscular industrial and pro-worker policies to protect American jobs and consumers; and I support renegotiating – aggressively – trade deals like the USMCA. I do not support the decades-long Washington consensus on free trade that has crushed American industry and jobs and given us far-flung supply chains that too often fail. It has been a bad deal for us in the Rust Belt and beyond… the Trump Administration’s trade approach has been chaotic, inconsistent, and incomplete: you need more than just tariffs to rebalance trade and kickstart American manufacturing” – Rep. Chris Deluzio (D – PA)
20. “The point of tariffs is to eliminate the race to the bottom where we’re exploiting people.” – Shawn Fain
21. “Tariffs are a powerful proven source of leverage to protect our national interests, We will win this trade war.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R – GA)
22. “Business investments will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocketbooks, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate,” – Bill Ackman
23. “The truth is tariffs are taxes. They don’t punish foreign governments; they punish American families.” – Sen. Rand Paul (R – KY)
24. “The President and the Secretary of Treasury and the Secretary of Commerce need to be very thoughtful when you have a brand, you need to behave in a way that respects that brand, that strengthens that brand because when you tarnish that brand, it can be a lifetime to repair the damage that has been done. In the financial markets, no brand compared to the brand of the U.S. Treasury market, the strength of the U.S. dollar. The strength, the credit worthiness of U.S. Treasury, no brand came close. We put that brand at risk” – Ken Griffin
25. “I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something. What’s going to happen with the market? I can’t tell you. But I can tell you our country has gotten a lot stronger. I spoke to a lot of leaders, European, Asian, from all over the world, they’re dying to make a deal. And I said, we’re not going to have deficits with your country. We’re not going to do that, because to me a deficit is a loss. We’re going to have surpluses or at worst, going to be breaking even.” – President Donald Trump
Who better to end this list of quotes on tariffs than the individual who may be the greatest cheerleader for tariffs in modern American history: President Donald Trump. President Trump’s tariff quote perfectly outlines how he views the harsh implementation of tariffs – as a medicine that needs to be taken regardless of consequences in order to remedy the sickness that is, in his mind, the international trade system. Time will only tell whether or not that medicine will prove effective. Let us know, what do you think of Trump’s tariffs and how has it affected your life so far (if at all)?