So anyway, tariffs on intermediate goods are bad. Economists knew this, and shouted it from the rooftops. But the Trump administration prides itself on not listening to economists. JD Vance has declared that “the economics profession doesn’t fully understand tariffs”, and hardly a day goes by when Trump-aligned intellectuals like Oren Cass don’t sneer at the economics field. And yet this willful ignorance comes with real political costs. No, economists don’t know everything about how the economy works. Maybe they don’t even know most things. But they do know some things, and one of those things is that taxing intermediate goods hurts the economy.