Abby McCloskey, Dallas Morning News, April 7, 2025

I was trying to think of an insect that tickles you nicely before it bites, some human experience of short-term pleasure before pain. The best I can come up with is a drug. Tariffs are like a drug. And drug stories rarely end well.

On April 2, President Donald Trump announced his plan for reciprocal tariffs — 10% worldwide as a baseline on long-time trading partners and foes alike. In many cases, it’s double, triple and quadruple that and more.

I couldn’t help but think of my relatives and friends as it went into effect. Many of them are financially well-off and have built American companies. Not like Meta or Musk companies, by which I mean that the types where the gains are so wild that you can afford tax shelters and fancy accounting accommodations.

I don’t come from a line of Ivy League entrepreneurs, silver spoons in our mouths, but instead the type who mixed perfumes to sell out in the basement in Ohio with a New York P.O. box (my father) and scraped through grad school in the Midwest.

But they have made real money, which they have long suspected Democrats as eager to take by hiking up top marginal tax rates. They are thus faithful Republican voters even if they roll their eyes at Trump’s various antics.

These lifelong conservatives thought the tariffs were a bluff. They, like the vast majority of Americans regardless of political orientation, believed that Republicans were the party to trust for economic growth and limited government.

Last week we learned they were not. The irony is the negative impact of tariffs on prices, the market and U.S. credibility is likely to far outweigh any changes to the tax code that Democrats could have implemented, or any pro-growth counterprogramming that the Trump administration might run, like tax and regulatory cuts.