Stephen Moore, President Trump’s choice for a seat on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, roundly criticized the president’s tariff policy last year in an op-ed column last year co-bylined with Larry Kudlow, now a White House economic adviser.
Moore and Kudlow, prominent supply-side advocates, said the Trump administration’s tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum cost the economy far more jobs than they create.
“But even if tariffs save every one of the 140,000 or so steel jobs in America, it puts at risk five million manufacturing and related jobs in industries that use steel,” Moore and Kudlow wrote for the Hill in March 2018. Economist Arthur Laffer was also credited as a co-author.
The trio warned that while the steel and aluminum industry may win in the short term, the much larger number of consumers of those products will be forced to pay more. “In fact, tariff hikes are really tax hikes,” they warned.
They also rejected the Trump administration’s claim that the tariffs were justified as national security measures to protect domestic industries. “Despite stiff competition from imports, many specialty steel producers are doing just fine and actually exporting steel to Mexico and Canada. Meanwhile, Canada is the No. 1 exporter of steel to the United States. Does anyone really believe Canada is a national security threat to the United States?” they wrote.
Both Moore and Kudlow, both longtime fixtures of the conservative policy world, were advisers to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Kudlow has since taken a more nuanced view of tariffs since joining the administration and has backed the administration’s efforts as a necessary tool to make trade partners agree to negotiations.
Moore, a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, has long advocated for reducing trade barriers.
