| Tariffs have been a trade weapon in the United States’ arsenal since the country’s very beginning. One of Congress’ first acts was to pass the Tariff Act of 1789, which was aimed at protecting domestic industry and raising revenue for the new government. In fact, tariffs actually constituted the majority of the federal government’s revenue until the creation of the income tax in 1913. With more money flowing into the government’s coffers from the income tax, along with the spoils of major industrial expansion in the late 1800s, import duties became less critical. Still, after the stock market crashed in 1929, Congress approved the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised already high tariff rates and angered the country’s trading partners. Trade between Europe and the U.S. fell by two-thirds, worsening the Great Depression. Some experts also say it helped give rise to extremist ideologies in Europe. But after World War II, the world rejected “protectionist” trade policies like tariffs, and 23 countries signed onto the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947, which later became part of the World Trade Organization. And we remained in that era of free trade for decades, amid rising globalization and corporations “offshoring” manufacturing to lower-cost countries like China. U.S. manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at 19.6 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but by 2019, that had fallen to 12.8 million, a 35% drop. Americans’ anxieties over the loss of such blue-collar jobs had been brewing long before Donald Trump, as the manufacturing sector was particularly hard hit by the 2008 Great Recession. Enter Trump, who tapped into those frustrations with an “America First” pitch. | 
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