Trump’s Tariffs Aren’t the Problem—They’re a Reckoning for a Broken System

Critics of Trump’s new round of tariffs are making a lot of noise. According to the pundits and legacy media talking heads, these tariffs are going to “hurt the economy,” “drive up prices,” and “alienate allies.” But what they won’t acknowledge or even refuse to address is that the problems they’re suddenly so concerned about have been with us for decades. The economic distortions Trump’s tariffs are trying to correct didn’t begin with tariffs. They began with decades of reckless policy, fantasy economics, and willful denial.

Let’s start with the basics. The American economy today is not grounded in real production or sustainable growth. In truth, it’s been kept afloat on $20 trillion in global stimulus, debt, and fictional accounting. Over the last 15 years, and especially since 2020, and the era of paying people to do nothing, we've flooded the markets with a deluge of newly printed money and government bailouts. That kind of intervention may mask the symptoms for a while, but it doesn’t cure the disease. It just delays the reckoning and makes it worse when it finally arrives.

Meanwhile, our national debt has ballooned to the point of no return. We're not just approaching fiscal unsustainability, we're already there. The idea that tariffs are a threat to American financial stability is absurd when the real threat is a $37 trillion debt load, an out-of-control federal budget, and a monetary policy that has been detached from reality for over a decade.

Ordinary folks have been seeing the results for years. Prices are up more than 20 percent across the board in just the last three years. That was not caused by tariffs. It was caused by fiscal irresponsibility. For everyday Americans, that 20 percent hit feels like an ongoing, ever-present tax. That’s because it is a tax. It’s also a wealth transfer from the working and middle classes to asset holders and political elites. It’s what happens when you run your country like a casino and your currency like a Ponzi scheme.

The stock market is no longer a true reflection of domestic economic health. It hasn’t been for years. It’s a global proxy—driven more by multi-national economies, inflationary pressures, actions by the Federal Reserve and hedge fund sentiment. No longer is it a true measure of American productivity.

When inflation took off post-Covid, the market became a refuge from inflation—an escape hatch for the wealthy. The surge in the financial markets came from investors’ response to inflation coupled with the fiscal stimulus and liquidity that was pumped in from central banks. The markets became an asset play instead of a reflection of true domestic economic health and growth.

The same distortion exists in the housing market. Residential real estate was transformed from shelter into an inflation-proof investment class. Hedge funds and institutional investors made matters worse by snapping up single-family homes, pricing ordinary Americans out of their own communities. None of this is sustainable. And none of it has anything to do with tariffs.

On the international front, our trade deficits have become structural. That wouldn’t be fatal if we were reinvesting foreign capital inflows into high-return domestic projects, like infrastructure, energy, or next-generation manufacturing. But we haven’t done that. Instead, we squandered trillions, outsourced our industrial base, hollowed out the middle class, and borrowed cheap capital to fund consumption and entitlement expansion.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with trade deficits and they can be manageable when they’re cyclical and we have something to show for the money borrowed. But we entered a multi-decade period of permanent, corrosive trade deficits, and we have little to show for these actions other than transient consumer goods from China.

On the topic of China, for decades, we pretended China’s rise was “good for everyone,” that free trade would democratize China, and that outsourcing our supply chains to a hostile regime was just a smart thing to do. All done in the pursuit of Globalization. Now we find ourselves dependent on a geopolitical adversary for everything from semiconductors to pharmaceuticals.

Trump’s tariffs didn’t create any of these problems. They’re an overdue correction and a long-delayed attempt to start reversing an outsourcing slide that’s gone out of control.

Europe, meanwhile, is in a state of slow-motion collapse. Economically stagnant, demographically imploding, and increasingly irrelevant on the world stage, the EU has become a cautionary tale rather than an economic model. Global supply chains that relied on Europe’s regulatory consistency and China’s manufacturing dominance are now buckling under bureaucratic pressures. Trump’s trade policies recognize this shift and seek to reposition the U.S. accordingly.

Unfortunately, we’re not dealing with the economy of the 1990s anymore. The quality of life Americans enjoyed in the 1980s and ’90s is light years from where we are now. Anyone who lived through those decades knows it. We've traded upward mobility for financial stress and dual incomes, national independence for global interdependence, and industrial power for cheap consumer goods made elsewhere.

Perpetual trade deficits, especially with adversarial countries, are not a sign of economic sophistication. They are a symptom of strategic negligence.

So when people claim Trump’s tariffs are the source of our problems, they’re either dishonest or hopelessly uninformed. The tariffs are a symptom of the crisis, not the cause. They are an imperfect but necessary negotiating ploy to begin the long, painful work of rebuilding an economic system that works for everyday Americans again.

We can no longer afford to live in a fantasy economy built on debt, inflation, and illusions of prosperity. We should stop pretending this crisis is new or that it can be blamed on a single policy or politician. The problems were already there, deeply embedded in our economy, ignored by a complacent elite that insisted everything was fine.

Trump’s tariffs didn’t cause this. They are the first honest attempt in generations to deal with a completely broken system.