The Trump administration cited an EPI blog post in yesterday’s announcement of reciprocal tariffs, noting that our blog post found that “tariffs implemented by President Trump during his first term ‘clearly show[ed] no correlation with inflation’ and had only a fleeting effect on overall prices.”

This is a fair-enough characterization of what the blog post said about the steel and aluminum tariffs it was analyzing, but it misleads in applying this conclusion to the tariffs being proposed yesterday (and in previous weeks) by the current Trump administration. Specifically, the steel and aluminum tariffs examined in that EPI blog post were narrowly targeted and applied to roughly $50 billion of imports, less than 2% of the imports that yesterday’s announced tariffs would apply to. In terms of assessing the effect of tariffs, this large difference in scale matters crucially.

It is hard to overstate what a radical change yesterday’s tariff announcements are relative to either the steel and aluminum tariffs we examined in that blog post or even to the full suite of tariffs passed in the first Trump administration. The first Trump administration’s tariffs were far narrower and only undertaken after a lot more study and consultation. For example, seven months into his first term, President Trump ordered the United States Trade Representative to investigate Chinese trade practices. The report was released in March 2018 and found a number of instances of China engaging in unfair practices. In that same month (over a year into the term), the Trump administration announced tariffs on up to $60 billion worth of imports from China.

By the end of the first Trump administration, further tariffs had been implemented. With these additional tariffs, roughly $380 billion worth of goods were subject to these taxes, which had been phased in over four full years.

Now, Trump is imposing tariffs on essentially all goods imports—more than $3 trillion—after just over two months into his term. Tariffs can be a legitimate and useful tool in industrial policy for well-defined strategic goals, but broad-based tariffs that significantly raise the average effective tariff rate in the United States are unwise. Further, the second Trump administration’s rationale, parameters, and timeline for tariffs have been ever-shifting. As the original post cited by the administration argues, tariffs should not be a goal unto themselves, but a strategic tool to pair with other efforts to restore American competitiveness in narrowly targeted industrial sectors.