Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the United States and China are considering lowering tariffs on “noncritical” items — the consumer goods that fill American shopping carts — as part of the package being assembled around this week’s Trump-Xi summit.
The collapse of the U.S.-Canada trade deal is providing a rare glimpse into the secret world of international trade negotiations. Beyond just the insider view, we are being given hope that the mirage of “Fortress North America” can be put to rest.
The SHIPS for America Act treats the duty on tonnage chiefly as a sanctions tool – a penalty reserved for adversary-linked shipping – while leaving the standard duty at rates the Founders would have mistaken for a rounding error. Here is a ranking of selected landmark federal rates from 1789 to today, in 2026 dollars.
President Trump’s revision to the steel tariff in 2025 was meant to fix the tariff inversion problem – situations where we tariff steel imports, but not things made of steel. Putting a tariff on metal can imports, but not metal cans filled with food, is a perfect example of mindless tariff inversion driving offshoring. This precise problem was solved and settled in 1930, and Commerce and USTR can fix it at any time with existing authority.
Last week, the White House declared an emergency under Section 318 of the Tariff Act of 1930 and suspended, for eight months, the collection of anti-dumping and countervailing duties on phosphate fertilizer from the Kingdom of Morocco.
Before USTR borrows the tin cartel’s playbook, it should look to the American tradition of minimum import pricing — and beware the foreign imitations that ended in ruin.
USTR says the U.S. goods deficit with China fell 46 percent. But the goods didn’t stop coming — importers just declared them worth less. Treating customs “value” as an appraisal hides the undervaluation now driving the numbers.
This week, Scott Lincicome marked the 250th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations by recruiting Adam Smith into the free-trade lobby’s war on American tariffs. It’s a clever conscription, but it depends on erasing the most important fact about Smith’s world: when Smith attacked “mercantilism,” he was attacking a system America’s founders also rejected — and replaced with something Smith never imagined.
The clock is ticking on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. On July 1, 2026, the three parties are scheduled to sit down for the formal “joint review” required by the deal itself. Under the terms USMCA’s drafters wrote into the agreement, the entire arrangement automatically expires on July 1, 2036 unless every government affirmatively recommits to it.
When the trade deficit goes down, that must mean good news for American manufacturers, right? No, that can’t be assumed. In the year since Liberation Day, a familiar pattern has played out: the value of imports decreased, while the actual quantity of imports increased.
