Someone invented a new and opaque term for a tax on imports to the country. This sort of tax has been called a tariff since at least the American Revolution, and "The Tariff" funded the federal government down until the invention of the income tax in the very early 20th century. The size of the tariff was a serious political issue from the Revolution right on.
We enacted a very stiff tariff, the Smoot Hawley tariff right after Great Depression I hit. Most historians and economists tell us that Smoot Hawley made the Great Depression worse, and prolonged it. Needless to say, "tariff" became something of a bad word most places. The exception was in union circles, the unions like tariffs.
There is a push to put in a tariff again. Only since "tariff" is now a bad word, they call it a "Border Adjustment Tax". And the newsies let them get away with it.
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If memory serves, the Great Depression didn't really start until after Smoot Hawley went into effect. Prior to that it was a moderately severe recession that was a fallout of the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Things were on a slow upward swing when the Smoot Hawley Tariff Act passed and was signed by Herbert Hoover in 1932. While it's intent was to 'protect' American jobs from foreign competition, what it did was kill international trade across the board which made a lot of those 'protected' jobs disappear. What's worse is that it did it in a very short period of time, only a matter of weeks, which turned the Great Recession 1 into the Great Depression.
What made the Great Depression linger were the various programs put in place by FDR that ended up strangling any recover due to heavy-handed regulations that stifled markets. The Depression didn't end until December 7th, 1941.
Depends upon which economist or historian you read. But it is clear that the stock market crash in 1929 was a bad thing, and most historians date the beginning of Great Depression I to the stock market crash. Economists are more likely than historians to pick other landmarks like passage of Smoot Hawley. I was a history major, so I tend to believe historians more than economists.
Economists have unusual definitions of things. For instance economists call the end of a recession has occurred when things stop going downhill. Most real people don't think a recession is over until things get back up to where they were before the recission. Which is why economists claim that Great Depression 2.0 was over in 2010 when things stopped getting worse. Democrats and the Obama administration loved this and used it in their campaigns. While real people think we are still in Great Depression 2.0, because things haven't gotten back to where they were in 2007.
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