Matthew Lynn opens his one-year anniversary of Liberation Day piece by noting that nobody organized a party. “As birthdays go,” he writes, “it was a very quiet affair.” Evidently he finds this odd, but there is a really easy explanation: you don’t throw a party when there’s nothing to celebrate. Deep down, even the most ardent tariff supporters understand what the evidence over the past year has shown. Manufacturers have shed jobs, all citing tariffs. Consumer prices continue to rise above the Fed’s 2% target. Trading partners are cutting deals with each other and deliberately circumventing America. The quiet is the sound of a policy whose own champions can’t quite bring themselves to cheer too loudly.
For the third time, Lynn has declared that economists owe tariff supporters an apology, that the doomsayers have been thoroughly rebuffed, and that the “Trump Trade Order, as Lynn calls it, is only the beginning of the greatness that is to come. I responded to similar claims made by him in October and again in December. One would hope that a third wouldn’t be necessary, but here we are.
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