STILL STINGING

Your Turn

Mark McBride

Guest columnist

A century later, tariffs still sting — just in different places.

Tariffs sound good when a politician says it fast, kind of like a quick chew of tobacco on a bee sting sounds like a remedy until the swelling starts. History taught us that when Washington starts tinkering with tariffs, somebody pays the price. Usually, it’s the farmer, the ranch hand or the family at the grocery store wondering why everything costs more than it did last month.

As Will Rogers put it, 'The tariff is an instrument intended for the benefit of those who ‘make’ to be used against those who ‘buy.’' He said that a hundred years ago, and we’re still proving him right.

When Rogers said it, America was fresh off the 1920s farm slump and heading into the Great Depression. Back then, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act choked off world trade, made farm prices collapse and turned a recession into a disaster.

Now here we are a century later. Different times, different tools, but the echoes sound familiar. While Washington debates who’s taxing whom, South America is stealing our market. Brazil and Argentina are shipping record loads of soybeans, corn and beef to China — the same markets our tariffs and trade disputes helped them capture.

To top it off, the U.S. just bailed out Argentina with a $20 billion credit line to stabilize its currency — money that helps them export even more beef and grain, the very products that compete with Oklahoma. It’s a bit like paying the neighbor’s feed bill while your own cows go hungry.

Out here at the ranch, you don’t need a Wall Street report to see the effects. Talk to a farmer standing by a broken-down tractor he’s patched together for the fifth time this season, keeping it alive with baling wire and duct tape because replacement parts are stuck on a ship somewhere — or priced out of reach thanks to tariffs and freight hikes.

He’s not fixing machinery; he’s holding a family operation together with the same stubborn grit that’s kept rural Oklahoma alive for generations.

Cattle herds are at their smallest in decades, feed costs are high and profit margins are thin. Imported beef from Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina keeps trickling in sometimes cheaper than what it costs us to raise it. Soybeans and grain producers aren’t faring much better. When China slapped retaliatory tariffs on U.S. soybeans, shipments nearly stopped. Billions in sales disappeared, and South America filled the gap overnight. Taxes dropped, bins filled up and many small producers took on more debt just to make it through the season.

But tariffs don’t stop at the farm gate — they hit grocery aisle, too. When you tax imported steel, aluminum or fertilizer, those costs crawl down the line into packaging, machinery and transportation. That means higher prices for bread, beef, milk and eggs. What starts as a trade war in Washington ends as sticker shock in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Hollis, McAlester and Seiling.

We’ve learned a lot since the 1930s, but the law of unintended consequences hasn’t changed. You can’t isolate an economy in a global marketplace and expect prosperity to bloom.

Even economists now say the results are mixed at best. The tariffs have raised federal revenue and protected some industries in the short term — but many studies show they also slow growth, chip away at wages, and hit families, farmers and small manufacturers hardest. In fact, several recent models project that tariffs of this magnitude could shrink GDP by multiple percentage points and reduce wages over the long run. In short, they haven’t been decisively successful in achieving their broader economic goals — and they come with substantial costs.

Tariffs are easy politics and hard economics. The last time we used them as a cure-all, it took a world war to reset the global system. Let’s hope this time’s different.

Maybe the same innovation that makes AI possible can also make trade fairer, supply chains smarter and farm products more competitive. We can’t control global politics from a tractor seat, but we can speak up from common sense. Washington should support American producers before foreign competitors, balance fair trade with free trade, and invest in innovation.

I do believe in a fair market, and it should be a fair playing field for the U.S. We carry the burden on so many things for the rest of the world, but looking at the past, we need to be cautious about how we proceed.

When politicians start meddling with markets — whether it’s tariffs, trade threats or sudden policy swings — it’s not Wall Street that pays the price first. It’s everyday people trying to make a living. That’s why history matters, and why we can’t afford to ignore its lessons.

Mark McBride, a Republican, is a businessman and consultant and a former member of the House of Representatives, from 2012-2024.