After saying only weeks ago he would impose across-the-board 10% tariffs on everything imported into the US from everywhere, presidential candidate Donald Trump told Fox News he would now put a 60% tariff on goods from China if he is elected and returns to the presidency.
The reaction from the businesses who could be most impacted by this huge increase was quick, with the head of the footwear association summing it as “catastrophic.”
This comes as a new study from an independent group of economists was just released, stating Trump’s previous trade policies, including tariffs, while he was president were largely ineffective and in fact cost American jobs rather than creating them as Trump has claimed.
“Certainly you can reject the hypothesis that this tariff policy was very successful at bringing back jobs to those industries that got a lot of exposure to that tariff war,” David Dorn, a University of Zurich economist who was one of the authors of this study told the New York Times in an interview.
The shoe association president, Matt Priest, had a similar take on these Trump tariffs. “There’s a ton of analysis out there that shows the first trade war was a big, fat loser for the U.S.,” the head of the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America told the Souring Journal.
“It would be catastrophic to the American economy, but the former president has a track record,” Priest told Sourcing Journal. “He proclaims he’s going to do these things and he does them. It creates a lot of uncertainty and a lot of increased costs for American companies and consumers, so we have to take it seriously.”
His counterpart in the apparel space concurred. “Five years ago, President Trump was unsuccessful in getting Beijing to change its behavior by making it more expensive for Americans to get dressed every morning, and we don’t see that changing in a second Trump Administration,” American Apparel and Footwear Association president and CEO Steve Lamar told Sourcing Journal.
It was only a few weeks ago that Inc.com reported Trump saying, “When companies come in they dump their products in the United States, they should pay, automatically, let’s say a 10% tax. I do like the 10% for everybody.”
Now candidate Trump is advocating a six-fold increase in that rate for imports from China. “This would be like imposing a 60-percent sales tax on every American closet, with that tax falling hardest on lower income American families,” AAFA’s Lamar told Sourcing Journal.
The economists who wrote the new study said the last Trump round of tariffs were “at best a wash, and it may have been mildly negative.”
His new tariff policy, if he’s elected, could be six times more negative.
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