Tag: Trump trade policy

Trump takes major step toward pushing Congress to vote on North America trade deal — despite Pelosi’s warning

The White House triggered a process Thursday that would allow President Trump to submit his new trade deal with Canada and Mexico to Congress after 30 days, three people briefed on the planning said, a direct challenge to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) who had warned against such a step.

The decision to send the draft “Statement of Administrative Action” to Congress marks a milestone in Trump’s push to overhaul the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, but it heightens tensions with Democrats who have said they need more time to review the deal and work for changes.

Pelosi directly cautioned U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer not to send the draft report until Democrats have spent more time working with the White House on the plan. And on Thursday, she attacked the White House’s decision to move ahead.

View the complete May 30 Damian Paletta, Erica Werner and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

Trump announces new $16 billion aid package for American farmers hit in trade war

NOTE:  We’ve never seen a trade war where the winning party has to bail out those damaged by those federal policies for a second time in one year.

President Trump, flanked by more than a dozen U.S. farmers at the White House, on Thursday announced a $16 billion farm aid package to offset losses from the U.S. trade war with China.

Trump told the farmers in attendance, including an Idaho potato farmer wearing a red “Make Potatoes Great Again” cap, that he was “honored to have done this for you.”

“This support for farmers will be paid for by the billions of dollars the Treasury takes in” from China, Trump said. He said it will keep America’s “cherished” farms thriving.

View the complete May 23 article by Laura Reiley, Colby Itkowitz and Annie Gowen on The Washington Post website here.

The Trade War President

The Chinese haven’t blinked at Trump’s hardball trade tactics – and that’s worrying farmers, politicians and businesses.

FARMERS ARE FRUSTRATED. Automobile workers are edgy. Consumers are bracing for cost increases. And the nation poised this year to eclipse the United States as the world’s biggest consumer market is refusing to budge as the Trump administration tries to get China to play fair on trade.

This was not the sort of wartime leader most presidents expect to be. But Donald Trump, praised by his acolytes (and himself) as a master negotiator and derided by his critics as more bully than bully pulpit orator, has gotten the country in a good old-fashioned trade war. And it’s one that may produce no economic or political winner.

Lawmakers in both parties have been irritated for some time over what they see as unfair trade practices by China, where there is more state control over the economy. The United States suffers from an enormous trade deficit with China, importing such items as electronics, clothing and manufactured goods. One exception is agriculture: The U.S. exports more to China than it imports. The Trump administration and other critics have also accused China of intellectual property theft and a variety of unfair trade practices.

View the complete May 17 article by Susan Milligan on The U.S. News and World Report website here.

Companies warn Trump trade war is about to hit consumers

U.S. companies are speaking out against President Trump‘s escalating trade war with China, with major players such as Walmart saying tariffs are forcing them to raise prices on consumer goods for Americans.

The price hikes could complicate things for Trump as the 2020 campaign picks up. The president has repeatedly asserted that China, and not U.S. consumers, would pay the price of the trade war.

“There are some places where, as we get tariffs, we will take prices up,” Walmart Chief Financial Officer Brett Biggs said Thursday in an earnings call.

View the complete May 17 article by Niv Elis on The Hill website here.

Trump administration cracks down on giant Chinese tech firm, escalating clash with Beijing

The Trump administration on Wednesday slapped a major Chinese firm with an extreme penalty that makes it very difficult for it to do business with any U.S. company, a dramatic escalation of the economic clash between the two nations.

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security said it was adding Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. to its “Entity List,” known to some as the “death penalty.”

This listing makes it virtually impossible for companies to survive once U.S. firms are discouraged from doing business with them. The Commerce Department said it had reached this decision because Huawei “is engaged in activities that are contrary to U.S. national security or foreign policy interest.”

View the complete May 16 article by Damian Paletta, Ellen Nakashima and David Lynch on The Washington Post website here.

Trump’s Malignant Trade War Reflects His Economic Ignorance

Larry Kudlow, Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, understands that tariffs on Chinese imports are a tax paid by American companies and consumers — a point his boss refuses to acknowledge. The president’s weird insistence that “China” pays the tariffs reflects not just his reluctance to take responsibility for tax increases but his longstanding, sincere and fundamentally mistaken views on international trade — views that do not bode well for the outcome of his trade war.

“Tariffs are NOW being paid to the United States by China of 25% on 250 Billion Dollars worth of goods & products,” Trump tweeted last Friday. As Kudlow conceded in a Fox News interview on Sunday, that is not how tariffs work. U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and they respond by reducing their profit margins, raising prices or both.

A recent study of Trump’s tariffs by economists at Princeton, Columbia and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York noted that, in 2018, “The U.S. experienced substantial increases in the prices of intermediates and final goods, dramatic changes to its supply-chain network, reductions in availability of imported varieties, and complete passthrough of the tariffs into domestic prices of imported goods.” By the end of the year, they estimated, the tariffs were costing Americans $3 billion a month in added taxes and another $1.4 billion a month in lost efficiency.

View the complete May 14 article by Jacob Sullum on the National Memo website here.

The misleading narrative in Trump’s tumble of trade tweets

As we have noted for years, President Trump appears to have little understanding of trade and trade policy, even though it is an animating element of his presidency. As the trade war with China has heated up, the president’s itchy Twitter finger has been busy with a fusillade of false or misleading tweets. Whether the president knows these claims are untrue is unclear, but the overall effect is to create a distinct winner-takes-all narrative for his trade policy. Here’s a quick tour through some of the major themes.

The U.S. is a loser

“We have lost 500 Billion Dollars a year, for many years, on Crazy Trade with China. NO MORE!”

— Tweet, May 10, 2019

This is the Rosetta Stone of the president’s trade philosophy — that the United States has been ripped off by other countries for years. It’s a view he expressed in full-page newspaper ads that ran in 1987, though then the main target was Japan.

But Trump consistently gets two things wrong here.

View the complete May 15 article by Glenn Kessler on The Washington Post website here.

Trump is taxing Americans to support farmers struggling from his trade war

To hear President Trump tell it, the calculus is simple.

Yes, farmers are feeling the pain of Trump’s trade war. China retaliated against tariffs imposed by the United States by adding tariffs of their own to American-made products, including crops. On Monday, soybean futures hit their lowest price in a decade.

But, Trump argues, those tariffs are “being paid to the United States by China of 25% on 250 Billion Dollars worth of goods & products.” Farmers, he claims, will end up being the “biggest beneficiaries of what is happening now” because either China will soon resume buying American crops or the United States “will be making up the difference” using “the massive Tariffs being paid to the United States.” Win-win.

The problems with that equation are twofold. First, China isn’t paying all of the tariffs and much of the increased cost is being incurred by American consumers. Second, we can look at the support being given to farmers in another light: Trump is taxing consumers to bolster farmers, a core part of his political base.

View the complete May 14 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

‘Chairman Mao’: Trump accused of ‘socialism’ after announcing $15 billion payoff plan to ‘our great patriot farmers’ as tariff war explodes

President Donald Trump continued his new habit of daily massive tweetstorms on Tuesday, starting at 6:15 AM and again focusing on his failed China tariffs “policy.” Trump has levied huge tariffs on goods coming into the U.S. from China – tariffs paid by Americans – and China in response announced it will impose tariffs on U.S. goods going in to China, escalating Trump’s tariff war.

As USA Today’s G. William Hoagland, who grew up on a farm, writes, “agriculture and farm families in the bread basket states have borne the brunt of the trade war.”

That war has spanned two years now, and it’s crushing many farms.

View the complete May 14 article by David Badash of the New Civil Rights Movement on the AlterNet website here.

GOP angst grows amid Trump trade war

Republicans are growing more nervous about next year’s race for the Senate as President Trump ratchets up a trade war with China that increasingly threatens to cause pain to U.S. farmers.

To be sure, the 2020 elections remain more than a year off, the president is popular in farm country and voters in rural states largely have stuck with Trump through thick and thin as the economy has grown and the jobless rate has fallen.

But GOP senators say few expected the trade war to last as long as it has.

View the complete May 14 article by Alexander Bolton on The Hill website here.