The Washington Post is reporting that President Donald Trump's aides "have drafted a proposal to impose tariffs of around 20 percent on most imports to the United States," which many prominent economists have argued would almost certainly push the United States into a recession.
Greg Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard University and a former Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, said that the tariff proposal being floated by the president indicated a deep-seated ignorance of how economies actually operate.
"“Trump doesn’t seem to understand basic international economics," he told the Post. "A lot of the arguments he makes, Adam Smith was refuting two and a half centuries ago in ‘Wealth of Nations'... I have not seen a more wrongheaded policy come out of a White House in decades.”
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And Mankiw wasn't the only economist who made dire projections about the impact of the Trump tariffs.
The Post writes that Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s, projects that "the economy would almost immediately tumble into a recession that would last for more than a year, sending the jobless rate above 7 percent" should Trump go through with his tariffs plans.
And economists at investment bank Goldman Sachs have warned that "the risk from April 2 tariffs is greater than many market participants have previously assumed," while also raising the chances of recession in the United States to 35 percent in the coming year.