Trump’s tariffs: folks, just a brief – kind of a brief riff tonight. Trump’s tariffs could be the path to economic prosperity and might be used for more tax cuts. That’s the subject of the riff.
So President Trump gave a vigorous defense of his reciprocal trade policy, saying basically America will no longer tolerate all of tariffs and non-tariff barriers constructed by China, the E.U. and many other countries that have prevented American manufacturers from exporting their goods to those countries.
He is raising the price of foreign imports to the U.S. by imposing these reciprocal tariff charges on the biggest offenders along with the 10% baseline tariff on everybody.
During his speech in the White House Rose Garden, he showed everyone a chart of all the tariff charges imposed on American exports
charges that have essentially been blocking our exports and have done great damage to U.S. manufacturers, automakers, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and plenty of other goods.
Now, he said he’s willing to do business with all these foreign countries. He will negotiate. He’s a master at it. So if they drop their charges on the U.S., the President would drop his charges on them. This seems fair-minded and common sense.
I thought his chart of all the tariff and tariff-related barriers imposed on American exporters was particularly effective in selling this to the American public. However, in after-hours trading the U.S. stock market seems to disagree, falling by 1,100 points as of this report.
Now, one of the biggest issues may be what to do with the newly anticipated import tariff revenues. As our Edward Lawrence reports, it could be $600 billion a year.
This would be a tremendous boon to all Americans, to business and to the goal of a 4% economic growth rate if we cut tax rates across the board: individual income tax cuts, corporate tax cuts, even cutting the Social Security payroll tax.
By the way, these kinds of additional tax cuts on top of the Trump tax cuts already out there would help, I think, to ease the way or soothe the way towards any short-term damage from the initial effects of the tariffs.
Source: raialkhalij + aljazeera