Americans Turn to ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ for Some Foreboding Education on Tariffs

Does anyone know what happens when a country slaps massive tariffs on the rest of the world all at once? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Yesterday, President Donald Trump officially launched his world trade war as the White House announced sweeping tariffs on our every international trading partner in a move that confounded and frightened economists from across the political spectrum. While history has repeatedly shown that such aggressive taxing on imported goods both fails to fix a country’s economic woes and provokes retaliatory action from foreign governments that worsens recessions and depressions alike, Trump is poised to prove hundreds of years of precedent and the entire worldwide economics community wrong, even if that group includes Ben Stein.

Apparently, neither Trump nor his supporters are big John Hughes fans, as they may have been able to avoid the impending and fast-moving financial crisis if they had just stopped and looked around once in a while:

As many fans of the 1986 teen comedy classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off rushed to remind the rest of the internet while #stockmarketcrash continues to trend on Twitter, the Matthew Broderick-led movie about a enterprising truant who spends a school day gallivanting around downtown Chicago with his depressed best friend and his unrealistically patient girlfriend featured some valuable economics lessons that neither the title character nor Trump ever learned. 

While Ferris was busy twisting and shouting, his classmates were learning about the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, the most recent attempt by Republican politicians to strong-arm the rest of the world into fixing America’s economic problems for us that failed miserably — well, it was the most recent example until yesterday morning, when Trump unveiled his own suspiciously similar and severely uninformed agenda. 

The above clip has already gone viral on Twitter multiple times since Trump launched his tariff campaign, though Stein’s economics lessons on the folly of tariffs has been gaining interest on the internet ever since Trump retook office earlier this year. Google searches for “Ferris Bueller tariff scene” hit a peak in early February, and spikes in searches restarted in early March as tensions with trading partners such as Canada continued to escalate.

Unfortunately, likely none of those Google searches came from the White House, and this chapter in American economic history will inevitably be the subject of a similar lecture in a teen comedy in 60 years, after Americans ditches the film format for the much more affordable and tariff-friendly medium of fire-lit plays performed in caves.