Stop Lying To Me About Trump’s Tariffs

Can people please stop talking complete, unmitigated claptrap on the subject of President Donald Trump, Mexican tariffs, and the U.S. economy? Is it really too much to ask?

The panic over the last few days about possible Mexican tariffs is even more ridiculous than the panic we had last month about the China tariffs — and that was bad enough.

Trump’s new tariff threat will send prices soaring for U.S. households, say the doomsayers. They’ll cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. They’ll crash the stock market. They’ll crash the economy.

Really? No doubt this is why the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.60% plunged 350 points in a panic on Friday. And the Dow’s performance since then through Wednesday? Up around 600 points.

Abdul El-Sayed touts ‘whole a–’ medical credentials while defending sex changes for children

Any ‘Iran Deal’ Must Include Justice for American Victims of State-Sponsored Terrorism

Liberal Donors, Corporate Interests Conspire to Help Left-Leaning Republicans in Deep Red Wyoming

White House unloads on violent ‘criminal alien’ nabbed after investigators uncover election offense

NBC beefs up security at ‘Today’ studio after Nancy Guthrie kidnapping, intruder incident

What does ‘Never Forget’ mean for a generation with no memory of 9/11?

If the US cuts funding to Israel, could Jordan and Egypt be next?

Have the Left and Right switched places on globalization and consumerism?

PBS’s ‘Marble Hall Murders’ features lovely locales, artful acting, and transfixing twists

Trump says he would ‘love’ to see Ireland unified as one nation

New York City Council pushes bill to take press passes away from ‘Mangionistas’

‘Disgusting Excuse for a Journalist’: NBC Boston Ripped to Shreds Over Hit Piece on Clancy Holdout Juror

We Didn’t Get This Angry Because Americans Changed: We Got This Angry Because Washington Did

Fox News Legal Analyst Jonathan Turley Thoroughly Dismantles Lindsay Clancy’s Attorney After Debate Challenge

The Constitution Was Made for a Moral People: It’s Time to Teach Our Kids That Lesson

The Standard & Poor’s 500 SPX, +0.54% is now higher than it was last Thursday, just before Trump shook his little fist at the Mexicans. And it’s not just the popular stocks such as Apple AAPL, +1.09% Netflix NFLX, +0.13% , and TSLA, +4.54% U.S. industrial stocks — as measured by the S&P 1500 Industrials index — are up 3%. The stocks of automobile components companies are up almost 5%. Small company stocks, often a useful barometer for the domestic, Main Street economy, are up about 1.5%, whether measured by the broad Russell 2000 RUT, -0.49% or the narrower, higher-quality S&P 600 index SML, -0.63% .

Sure, a few days’ stock market action doesn’t mean much long term. And the stock market isn’t America. But then again, apparently it was an Infallible Omen of Doom when the stock market fell on Friday. You see how that works?

Whether or not these tariffs are a sensible policy is another matter. But anyone claiming they will cost households a small fortune and wipe out vast numbers of jobs is relying on some heroic assumptions. Or, as non-economists call them: guesses.

U.S. imports from Mexico came to $372 billion last year, according to the federal government. So slapping a 5% tariff on them amounts to a federal tax hike of… er… $19 billion. Total federal taxes last year: $3.3 trillion. So we’re talking about a 0.6% tax hike.

But the Mexican peso USDMXN, +0.4490% has already reacted. It has weakened by 2.7% against the U.S. dollar DXY, -0.30% in a few days — wiping out more than half of that cost increase.