The (misguided) Americans who voted for Donald Trump and thought he actually cared about them are about to be very disappointed. While the president bragged about how much more money they were going to have in their wallets under his presidency, it’s now clear that the exact opposite is happening.
In a piece in the Washington Examiner, Bryan Riley, director of the Free Trade Initiative at the National Taxpayers Union, and Andrew Wilford, a policy analyst with the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, have sounded the alarm about Trump’s tariffs. It turns out that thanks to Trump’s latest round of tariffs, Americans will be paying far more in taxes than they did on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
Riley and Wilford outlined Trump’s recent tariffs, pointing out that the current 10 percent tax Trump imposed on $200 billion of Chinese imports was going to rise to 25 percent right at the start of 2019. Outlining just how Trump had fooled and screwed Americans over, the authors wrote:
With the added $20 billion in trade taxes coming from this latest round of tariffs, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation now estimates the total annual cost of enacted tariffs to be $41.65 billion. That easily outpaces the tax bill from the Affordable Care Act for next year ($34.6 billion) after accounting for recent changes to the ACA.”
And it’s going to get worse, apparently. Riley and Wilford explained:
The $67.2 billion estimated 2019 tax burden of the Affordable Care Act prior to those changes is lower than the cost of new trade taxes once a scheduled $30 billion tariff increase takes effect in January. If every currently proposed tariff is enacted, the total trade tax burden will nearly double even the tax burden of the pre-reform ACA — NTUF estimates the net total of proposed and enacted trade taxes to be $132.55 billion. That would offset more than 70 percent of the $188.8 billion in 2019 individual income tax cuts.”
Trump has tried to spin things to keep his gullible voters worshipping him by regularly talking about the tariffs that he’s putting on other countries, however his administration purposely avoids discussing the tariffs that will, in turn, be put on American businesses and consumers. Trump doesn’t want his fanbase to realize that his ridiculous trade war is going to come out of their pockets.
American consumers pay for tariffs as well. Tariff costs paid by an importing business are generally passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Even when a domestic business chooses to change its behavior because of a tariff and avoid foreign goods, there was likely a reason why the domestic business had previously been importing foreign goods over domestic ones. Whether it means higher prices or lower-quality goods, American consumers pay the price.”
In closing, the authors outlined why the tariffs Trump is playing around with are so bad and disastrous to Americans:
Businesses experiencing increased supply costs must make up the loss elsewhere, often through reduced wages or employment. As statements by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and trade adviser Peter Navarro have reminded us, the costs of tariffs are often spread across the economy and hidden — a few extra cents for a six-pack of soda or a can of soup, or a few extra dollars for a new appliance. That’s why tariffs are especially dangerous. They allow the government to pick winners and losers by imposing a hidden tax that is regressive and weakens Americans’ economic security.”
Trump has botched nearly everything he has tried to do within his short presidency thus far. The last thing we need him to do is screw up this.
Featured image via screen capture
