How U.S. has used tariffs through history—and why Trump is different

President Donald Trump imposed broad tariffs on China that took effect Tuesday, while his tariff threats hang over other major trading partners: Canada, the European Union and Mexico.

That may lead some to wonder: How have tariffs been wielded throughout U.S. history, and is Trump’s use of them unusual?

The U.S. has used tariffs since its founding in the 18th century.

In fact, the Tariff Act of 1789 was among the first bills ever passed by Congress.

Since then, the U.S. has used tariffs to achieve three broad goals, said Douglas Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College and past president of the Economic History Association.

Irwin calls them the “three Rs”: revenue; restriction, or import barriers to protect domestic industry; and reciprocity, a bargaining chip to cut deals with other countries.

Tariffs are taxes on U.S. imports, paid by the entity that’s importing the foreign goods. Those taxes raise revenue to help fund the federal government.

For roughly the first third of the nation’s history — from its founding until the Civil War — the revenue motivation was “paramount” as a driver to impose import duties, Irwin said. The federal government relied on tariffs for about 90% or more of its revenue during that period, he said.

But things changed after the Civil War, Irwin said. The U.S. started to impose other taxes, such as excise taxes, that made the nation less reliant on tariffs.

Tariffs generated about half of federal revenue from about 1860 to 1913, when the income tax was created, Irwin said.

The scale of the government expanded significantly in the 1930s — with the creation of New Deal programs such as Social Security — and later for defense spending during World War II and the Cold War, said Kris James Mitchener, an economics professor at Santa Clara University who studies economic history and political economy.

Today, “tariffs simply cannot raise enough revenue to fund government expenditure,” Mitchener said. “There’s no possible way you could support the size of the U.S. military on tariff revenue.”

From the Civil War to the Great Depression, the U.S. primarily used tariffs as a restrictive measure on imports, to insulate the domestic market from foreign competition, Irwin said.

The Tariff Act of 1930, popularly known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, levied protective tariffs on about 800 to 900 different types of goods, accounting for about 25% of all goods imported to the U.S., Mitchener said.

The U.S. also used tariffs as a reciprocal bargaining chip.

For example, before the U.S. annexed Hawaii, it signed a free-trade agreement with the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1875. The treaty allowed for duty-free imports of Hawaiian sugar and other agricultural products into the U.S. In exchange, the U.S. got exclusive access to the harbor that…