I've been mostly off Twitter the past few days -- life intervened -- but now have a bit of time to say some more about tariffs. We'll be having a feature with me answering questions in a couple of days, but here's a thread with some basic observations 1/
Start with a widespread misconception: the belief that during the good decades after WWII, the U.S. had high tariffs. Actually no: most of the big drop in tariffs from their 1930s peak took place by the mid-1950s usitc.gov/publications/3… 
The bad times for US workers started much later, in the 1970s. Here's the real wage of nonsupervisory workers, with 1973=1 3/
And the big move into trade deficits came even later than that, beginning in the Reagan years. Really really big deficits came during the Bush years, largely reflecting the housing bubble; they've been smaller since 4/
What about imports, as opposed to the trade balance? Non petroleum imports -- we really aren't talking about oil here -- rose steadily as a share of the economy, including during the good years, until about 2010, and have leveled off since 5/
What is true is that the sources of imports changed after around 1990, with rapid growth of manufactured imports from developing countries. Mainly due to changes abroad: China's move to a market economy, Mexico's opening (which pre-dated NAFTA) 6/
I'm not saying that trade was blameless in the woes of U.S. workers; labor-intensive imports widened inequality, and the sheer speed of change was disruptive and painful. But you want to get the story straight 7/ ddorn.net/papers/Autor-D…
And you want in particular to ask whether Trumponomics wouldn't just add to the disruption (spoiler: yes) krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/the… 8/
