“Analysis of Donald Trump’s Tariff Strategy Discrepancy with Chicago Economist Brent Neiman’s Research”

CHICAGO (WLS) — A Chicago economist in now at the center of the firestorm surrounding President Donald Trump’s tariff policy.

University of Chicago Booth School of Business economist Brent Neiman told the I-Team the policy is based, in part, on academic work he co-wrote with three renowned economists — which he insists the administration miscalculated.

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Neiman wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed on Monday, “they got it all wrong”.

When Trump paraded an oversized chart into the Rose Garden last week as part of his pitch for global tariffs, some economists’ eyes popped at the seemingly inflated numbers.

Neiman was one of them.

“My immediate thought was ‘Gosh, how could those numbers be so high?'” he said.

Those numbers, Trump said, show tariffs levied against U.S. products by other countries.

But those numbers, economists explain, are not tariffs against the U.S., but a calculation of trade deficit between the U.S. and other countries.

And it was Neiman’s work, in part, from this 2021 research piece on tariffs published by the American Economic Association, Trump’s team cited in calculating those reciprocal tariffs.

And the administration’s math, Neiman said doesn’t check out.

“I think they grabbed the wrong number from our research. The one that I would use from my own research and plug into their equation is actually four times larger than the number they used, and as a result, the deficits they calculated are four times larger than I think they should have got.”

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Northwestern University economist Martin Eichenbaum knows that report and its authors well.

“We trade both in goods and services, and apparently they only use goods, and that makes a huge difference, because we export a lot of services, like finance, entertainment, health, universities, right,” stated Eichenbaum.

Now, as markets reel in the uncertainty of tariffs and global trade, Trump on Monday showed no sign of changing course.

He said, “It’s the only chance we’re going to have to reset the table on trade, and when we do, we’re going to come out unbelievably well. We’re going to have a strong country economically again and we’re going to have those factories that are empty all over the United States.”

Neiman tried to make clear in the New York Times Op Ed that his philosophy and math do not support these reciprocal tariffs.

He explained, “The last thing I wanted was my work to be described as leading to these policies, which I think are really bad for Americans.”

Neiman, who worked for the U.S. Treasury Department under the Biden administration, said he has not spoken with the Trump administration directly, but he’s been told that they are aware of him pointing out their mathematical error.