Will Trump be disastrous for our economy? I doubt it

When, in its wisdom, the American electorate does something really stupid, it’s tempting to predict death and disaster for the whole world, including us.

But though the Yanks are embarking on a bout of serious self-harm – and this will have costs for the rest of the world economy – let’s not kid ourselves that we’ll be prominent in the firing line.

Leaving aside Donald Trump’s climate change denial – a topic I’ll get to another day – his most damaging stated economic policy is to make America great again by imposing a tariff (import duty) of 10 to 20 per cent on all America’s imports except imports from China, which will cop 60 per cent.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told parliament on Wednesday he could work with Donald Trump.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen/AP

This is rampant populism – it sounds like a great idea to those who understand nothing about how economies work but it will make the US economy worse rather than better. Trump claimed this new tax would be paid by the foreign suppliers but, in reality, it will be paid by those American consumers and businesses that continue to buy imported items.

So the man who got elected because the punters hate inflation will be acting to worsen inflation. This isn’t likely to do much to increase the demand for locally made manufactures but, to the extent that it does, automation and digitisation will mean it does little to create more jobs in manufacturing.

We import more from the Yanks than we export to them. It’s China and the Europeans Trump will be going after, not us.

Another reason protectionism doesn’t work is that America’s major trading partners – particularly China and Europe – are likely to retaliate by imposing tariffs on their imports from America. We know from history that trade wars end up leaving both sides worse off.

So the United States will suffer most, although all countries that trade with it will suffer to some extent. But get this: the US is not one of our major trading partners. It takes only about 5 per cent of our exports. Our big partners are China, Japan and South Korea.

Like many ignorant Americans, Trump believes any country that runs a bilateral trade surplus with the US must be doing so because they’re cheating in some way. Not a problem for us: we import more from the Yanks than we export to them. It’s China and the Europeans Trump will be going after, not us.

To the extent that Trump hurts the Chinese economy – as part of the Americans’ bipartisan obsession with trying to prevent China usurping their place as the world’s top dog – that will have an adverse flow-on to us.

But the Chinese have their own ways of fighting back. In any case, the greatest risk to our economy is not from what the Yanks do to the Chinese but from what the Chinese stuff up on their own account.

While it’s clear Trump is well placed politically to press on with implementing the crazy policies he has promised, that doesn’t mean he’ll do everything he’s said he’ll do to the full extent that he’s said. For instance, why would he tax all imports of goods and services when it’s manufacturers he’s really on about? Also, not everything he tries to do will be done in next to no time.

We know the man. He’s nothing if not capricious. Dead keen one minute, moved on the next. And as someone who sees himself as the great dealmaker, he’s highly transactional. A 20 per cent tariff may be just the list price before the bargaining starts. ANZ economists say the average tariff on Chinese goods will go from 13 per cent to 22 per cent, not 60 per cent.

The truth is that we’re too small to figure largely in Trump’s thinking. And why kick the US lapdog we’ve made ourselves?

President-elect Donald Trump says he wants to cut the rate of company tax and “extend” his 2017 personal income tax cuts. Credit: Alex Scott

Trump has made much of his promise to deport the many millions of undocumented immigrants. Most of these people are doing jobs Americans don’t want to do. Getting rid of them would reduce the size of the economy while increasing inflation as employers offer higher wages to attract other people to unattractive jobs.

But not to worry. It’s hard to see just how he’d round up all these people without calling out the military. It’s much easier to see him limiting himself to trying harder to stop more people crossing the Mexican border. In this case, the reduction in the economy and the rise in costs would be smaller.

So far, his policies on tariffs and immigration seem likely to increase America’s rate of inflation while reducing its economic activity. Great idea. But then we come to his promises for big tax cuts.

He says he wants to cut the rate of company tax and “extend” his 2017 personal income tax cuts, which greatly favoured the high-income earners more likely to have been too smart to have voted for him.

In principle, you’d expect tax cuts to be expansionary and thus possibly inflationary. But note this: according to a strange American custom, the personal tax cuts enacted in 2017 are due to expire at the end of next year.

So extending them means not that everyone gets a tax cut, but everyone avoids a tax increase. The troops’ after-tax income is unchanged. But, of course, the budget deficit is now worse than previously projected.

One thing we can be sure of is that Trump’s not a man to worry about deficits and debt. Republican congresspeople do have a history of worrying about such matters – but only when those irresponsible Democrats are in charge.

The Yanks do have many of the smartest academic economists in the world and, as the US government’s annual interest payments get to be bigger than its spending on defence, they’re starting to wonder how long America’s fiscal insouciance can continue before something goes wrong. But the reckoning is unlikely to come in the next four years.

All told, it does seem that Trump’s policies will cause America’s inflation and interest rates to be higher than they would have been had Kamala Harris won the presidency. But what doesn’t follow is that this will have much effect on our inflation and interest rates, and on our Reserve Bank’s decision about when to start cutting rates to prevent us having an accidental recession.

Ross Gittins is the economics editor.

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