Source: Cailian
Financial Union, October 25 (Editor Xia Junxiong)Prominent economists such as Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen have urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn most of President Trump's global tariffs, saying they are based on misunderstandings about the global economy.
Bernanke and Yellen both served as chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Yellen was the last U.S. Treasury Secretary.
Nearly 50 economists in a legal opinion submitted Friday pointed out that trade deficits between the United States and other countries are a “normal phenomenon” and are not the “abnormal and extreme” threat the Trump administration called when it cited an emergency order to impose large-scale tariffs.
These economists come from a variety of backgrounds and political positions, including former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former President Bush’s Chairman of the Economic Advisory Committee, Greg Mankiw, and President of the Economic Advisory Committee during the Obama administration, Jason Furman.
“Peer-to-peer tariffs can’t ‘solve’ the trade deficit problem,” the document says, “Instead, they will have trillion-dollar impacts on the economy and affect every household and state.”
“It’s just the basic common sense of economics, but its impact is far-reaching,” the economists added.
At the beginning of April, Trump introduced the so-called "reciprocal tariffs" measures, imposing tariffs on almost all trading partners, and the specific rates vary according to the country's trade deficit to the United States.
The legal basis Trump cited at the time was the International Economic Emergency Power Act (IEEPA), a law that gives the president extensive powers to act by economic means in response to national security threats from abroad.
The U.S. Court of International Trade had previously ruled that Trump's tariffs were illegal, and the federal appeals court also upheld the ruling. Trump then appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which will hold an oral argument on November 5th to hear whether Trump's tariff measures have legal basis.
Economists criticized Trump for imposing tariffs on many countries on the basis of "almost impossible trade deficit". In the document, they quoted a joke by Robert Solow, the Nobel laureate in economics: "I have always had a trade deficit with the barber-because he never buys me anything."
Currently, a number of external agencies express their positions to the justices through the so-called "amicus brief."
The economist document above is one of several documents supporting challenging Trump's tariffs. Other groups that submitted opinions included 31 former federal judges, former military and national security officials, and foreign policy scholars.
The Trump administration has also received support from some external groups. The U.S. Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) argued in the filing that the president is "the only authority in foreign affairs."
"When the federal court challenged the president's judgment on international emergencies and economic threats afterwards, it not only exceeded its due scope of authority, but also destroyed the constitutional framework that has sustained our Republic for more than two hundred years," the organization said.