On the fiftieth anniversary of the most important piece of trade legislation since the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, it is worth assessing the value of the Trade Act of 1974 (TA74) and identifying its place in US economic history. Like the 1934 Act, the 1974 Act was a complete reversal of where American trade policy had been four years earlier. 1930 saw the enactment of the Smoot-Hawley tariff which further cut back trade ties with all other countries through imposing very high tariffs. In 1970, the Congress came close to passing the “Mills bill,” which was more anti-trade than Smoot-Hawley in that it promised import quotas rather than tariffs. Famed Nobel laureate economist Paul A. Samuelson said of it that he “cannot imagine anything more malignant” for the nation's economy than the [1970] trade bill before Congress.
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