Tariffs Are For Emergencies
Nondelegation, denominators, leveraged long-short ETFs, full retail-price real estate and johns.
The stock market continued to crash this morning because of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs announced last week. Despite widespread criticism of the tariffs, Trump is unmoved. He gets to decide, and he has decided that the tariffs are good.
But does he get to decide? In some ways the simplest solution to the tariff problem is the one that I wrote about last Thursday. The US Constitution says that “the Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” The power of taxation is the most fundamentally legislative function, so much so that the Constitution also says that “all Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” This was at the very center of constitutional design, and in fact of the founding of America. As a history of the House puts it: