When Smoot was smitten with tariffs: where there is pressure to “do something”, the lack of a

[pampango]

practical solution is seldom a barrier to mischief.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/eb6357c0-3d1a-11e0-bbff-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1EaoLpkGn

The Utah Republican senator Reed Smoot once had a reputation as a Washington sage. Today he is remembered as captain of the ship of fools that in 1930 passed the most damaging piece of trade legislation in US history. Smoot wanted to prop up the market in sugar beets, which his constituents grew. He also wanted to protect citizens from imported pornography. ... Economists warned, almost unanimously, that he was on the path of folly. Smoot dismissed them as the dark, “powerful forces” that “lurk in the international economic conferences held in Europe”.

The consequences of the Smoot-Hawley tariff have sometimes been exaggerated, Irwin believes. It raised the average tariff by only about 6 cents in the dollar. It was not responsible for most of the fall in US and world trade. It did not make a Great Depression out of what would otherwise have been a mere recession. But the damage was severe enough: a steep decline in the US share of world exports and the spread of retaliatory tariffs and anti-American blowback around the world.

Smoot-Hawley was aimed at a genuine problem. The 1920s were boom times, but falling crop prices drove almost a fifth of farms into foreclosure between 1926 and 1929. Democrats and Midwestern Republicans proposed helping farmers with price supports and export subsidies. But Smoot and his men had a different idea: “parity for agriculture”, welcoming US farms into the same tariff arrangements as US factories. This was wrongheaded. How would raising tariffs boost farm prices when Americans imported only one out of 80 potatoes, and one out of 8,500 eggs? In their certitude that tariff hikes were the answer, no matter what the question, Smoot’s Republicans resemble today’s Republicans, who put a similar faith in tax cuts.

The legislative circus in which Smoot-Hawley was enacted, however, will remind readers of the way Democrats in the last Congress passed their healthcare bill. Then as now, a project conceived in flush times as the least we could do for those left behind was brazenly remarketed, under worsening economic circumstances, as being in the general economic interest. ... Twice, in November 1929 and March 1930, Smoot-Hawley appeared to have died of its own hubris and illogic. Then, in June 1930, it passed in a flurry of parliamentary manoeuvres and vote-buying, and President Herbert Hoover signed it into law, conceding it was not “perfect”. His Republicans lost their House majority in that autumn’s elections to an opposition (Democrats) urging repeal.