Someone Should Tell Donald Trump About America's High Tariffs - NYT Editorial Board
In accusing other countries of cheating the United States, the president misleads the public about a complicated subject.
By The Editorial Board
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.
July 10, 2018
To hear President Trump tell it, every other country in the world is taking advantage of the United States by selling milk, cars, steel and other products to America while refusing to buy made-in-the-USA merchandise. His ceaseless complaint about trade — with neighbors like Canada and Mexico, allies in Europe or mercantilist China — is that the United States is getting a raw deal. Much of what the president has said is malarkey.
It’s true that America has run a large trade deficit for many years, and that some countries — China in particular — have used underhanded tactics like depressing their currencies to boost exports. But, by and large, the world is not ripping off the United States. Scratch the surface of many of the president’s statements about trade, and it’s hard not to conclude that he is either trying to confuse the public or is rather confused himself.
Recently, Mr. Trump has unleashed his Twitter account on one of America’s oldest and closest friends, Canada, criticizing the country’s decision to protect its dairy industry. Last month, the president railed about that country’s “270 percent tariff on Dairy Products!” — a statistic that sounds outrageous but really is not. Canada allows a small quota of American dairy imports to come in with low or zero tariffs. Imports above that amount are taxed at varying rates that can exceed 300 percent for some goods.
Link to tweet
Do you know which other country protects its dairy industry in a similar way? You guessed it: the United States. American dairy quotas and tariffs are so restrictive that the vast majority of the milk, cheese and butter families in the United States buy is made domestically. In fact, dairy producers in Wisconsin and other states sold $792 million in products to Canada in 2017, while Canadian producers sold just $149 million of dairy to the United States, according to the Brookings Institution.
And yet the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, doesn’t bellyache incessantly on Twitter about unfair American dairy tariffs.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/opinion/editorials/someone-should-tell-donald-trump-about-americas-high-tariffs.html
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