Last week, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers issued a dire warning that Trump tariffs are “more inflationary by far than what Biden did in 2021.”

We are NOT fans of tariffs because protectionist policies typically make countries poorer.

But the evidence that tariffs are inflationary is spotty at best.

Everyone knows that the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariffs in 1930 plunged the U.S. into the Great Depression – as chronicled in the Jude Wanniski classic book “The Way the World Works.”

But they did NOT cause inflation. Investment expert Michael Lebowitz puts those inflation claims to the test and shows that prices actually FELL after the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were passed – as this chart shows:

Monetary expert Judy Shelton – who should be the next chair of the Federal Reserve – tells us: “the simplistic assessments that ‘tariffs cause inflation’ (including from Janet Yellen) are laughably static with no regard for consumer behavior and substitution patterns.”

Trump raised tariffs in his first term, but where was the inflation? There wasn’t any.

The graph below shows that US import prices fell from 2018 until the price surge due to the pandemic in late 2020.

Milton Friedman said it best: inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. Anti-growth policies like taxes and tariffs make nations poorer, but they are only inflationary if the Fed expands the money supply at the same time the economy stalls out. That’s what happened in 2021 and 2022, and a major reason the Left lost this year.