Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – the classic 1980s film by John Hughes about Matthew Broderick’s titular character convincing his friends to play hooky from high school for an adventure through Chicago – has a surprising lesson about our current economic situation hidden in it.
Amid Porsche crashes and The Beatles sing-alongs, the movie includes a scene of bored high schoolers zoning out to a lecture from their economics teacher, played by Ben Stein. He’s telling the students about tariffs.
That’s why the scene has gone viral this week, according to USA Today. Tariffs have been on everyone’s mind since new ones ordered by President Donald Trump kicked in Tuesday for Canada, Mexico and China, and they have business and consumers worried about price increases as a trade war commences. Audacy reported this week that the Cato Institute predicts the tariffs will cost Americans $1,200 or more a year.
Trump himself noted that there could be some “disturbance” created by the tariffs during his address to Congress Tuesday, but he said that it would be worth it.
As Stein’s economics teacher character explained, the U.S. has attempted to use tariffs to its advantage before.
“In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in effort to alleviate the effects of the… anyone? Anyone? Great Depression – passed the anyone… anyone?” he asks. “The tariff bill… the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which – anyone? Raised or lowered? Raised tariffs in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government.”
According to the U.S. Senate, the roots of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act date back to 1929, when then-President Herbert Hoover called Congress into special session to deal with a troubled farm economy that had fallen into a depression. He “proposed a ‘limited revision’ of the tariff on agricultural imports to raise rates and boost sagging farm prices,” the Senate explained.
However, Republican Rep. Willis Hawley of Oregon “took the opportunity to raise industrial tariffs to new highs,” then, other economic interests lobbied to the Senate Finance Committee, chaired by Utah senator Reed Smoot, for even more tariff hikes. Democrats and progressive Republicans protested the hikes, but Hoover eventually signed the tariff act in June 1930.
“Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects?” asks the economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.”
In fact, the Senate said the legislation is “among the most catastrophic acts in congressional history.” Like today, trading partners responded with their own high tariffs. That froze international trade and led to both progressive members of Hoover’s party and American voters turning against him. As for Hawley and Smoot? Voters turned against them too.
Even after Trump’s address, people across the U.S. are already nervous about the impact of tariffs, from people who have been shelling out more to buy eggs at the grocery store and Midwestern farmers to retail giant Target and business owners in Texas. Trump also raised tariffs during his first term, a move that negatively impacted some U.S. businesses, including aircraft manufacturer Boeing.
This time around, the end goal of the tariffs is a bit different than the ones from Hoover’s era. Trump has said that the tariffs are in part a method for preventing illegal immigration into the U.S. and stopping the dangerous drug fentanyl from entering the country, and he campaigned on a promise to put the new tariffs in place. Experts have said that tariffs work best when they have a specific goal.
“Justin Trudeau, of Canada, called me to ask what could be done about Tariffs,” said Trump in a Wednesday Truth Social post referencing the Canadian prime minister. “I told him that many people have died from Fentanyl that came through the Borders of Canada and Mexico, and nothing has convinced me that it has stopped. He said that it’s gotten better, but I said, ‘That’s not good enough.’”
Will this plan work out better than Hawley-Smoot? Hopefully, we won’t have to wait a few decades for another teen comedy to tell us.