The United States in recent years has gradually retreated from its post-World War II role of promoting global free trade and lower tariffs. That shift has been a response to the loss of US manufacturing jobs, widely attributed to unfettered tree trade and an increasingly powerful China.
Tariffs are in the news at the moment, as President Trump puts them at the top of his list of potential punishments. Here’s what they are and what you need to know about them:
Tariffs are a tax on imports
Tariffs are typically charged as a percentage of the price a buyer pays a foreign seller. In the United States, tariffs are collected by Customs and Border Protection agents at 328 ports of entry across the country.
US tariff rates vary: They are generally 2.5% on passenger cars, for instance, and 6% on golf shoes. Tariffs can be lower for countries with which the United States has trade agreements. For example, most goods can move among the US, Mexico and Canada, tariff-free because of Trump’s US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.
Mainstream economists are generally skeptical of tariffs, considering them a mostly inefficient way for governments to raise money and promote prosperity.
The misinformation about who actually pays tariffs
President Donald Trump, a proponent of tariffs, insists that they are paid for by foreign countries. In fact, its is importers – American companies – that pay tariffs, and the money goes to the US Treasury. Those companies, in turn, typically pass their higher costs on to their customers in the form of higher prices. That’s why economists say consumers usually end up footing the bill for tariffs.
Still, tariffs can hurt foreign countries by making their products pricier and harder to sell abroad. Foreign companies might have to cut prices – and sacrifice profits – to offset the tariffs and try to maintain their market share in the United States. Yang Zhou, an economist at Shanghai’s Fudan University, concluded in a study that Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods inflicted more than three times as much damage to the Chinese economy as they did to the US economy.
What has Trump said about tariffs?
Trump has said tariffs will create more factory jobs, shrink the federal deficit, lower food prices and allow the government to subsidise childcare.
“Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented”, Trump said at a rally in Flint, Michigan, during his presidential campaign.
As president, Trump imposed tariffs with a flourish – targeting imported solar panels, steel, aluminium and pretty much everything from China.
“Tariff Man”, he called himself.
Trump promised even more and higher tariffs in second term
The United States in recent years has gradually retreated from its post-World War II role of promoting global free trade and lower tariffs. That shift has been a response to the loss of US manufacturing jobs, widely attributed to unfettered tree trade and an increasingly powerful China.
Tariffs are intended mainly to protect domestic industries
By raising the price of imports, tariffs can protect home-grown manufacturers. They may also serve to punish foreign countries for committing unfair trade practices, like subsidising their exporters or dumping products at unfairly low prices.
Before the federal income tax was established in 1913, tariffs were a major revenue driver for the government. From 1790 to 1860, tariffs accounted for 90% of federal revenue, according to Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth College economist who has studied the history of trade policy.
Tariffs fell out of favour as global trade grew after World War II. The government needed vastly bigger revenue streams to finance its operations.
In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the government collected around $80 billion (€76 billion) in tariffs and fees. That’s a trifle next to the $2.5 trillion (€2.4 trillion) that comes from individual income taxes and the $1.7 trillion (€1.6 trillion) from Social Security and Medicare taxes.
Still, Trump wants to enact a budget policy that resembles what was in place in the 19th century.
Tariffs can also be used to pressure other countries on issues that may or may not be related to trade. In 2019, for example, Trump used the threat of tariffs as leverage to persuade Mexico to crack down on waves of Central American migrants crossing Mexican territory on their way to the United States.
Trump even sees tariffs as a way to prevent wars
“I can do it with a phone call”, he said at an August rally in North Carolina.
If another country tries to start a war, he said he’d issue a threat: “We’re going to charge you 100% tariffs. And all of a sudden, the president or prime minister or dictator or whoever the hell is running the country says to me: ‘Sir, we won’t go to war’.”
Economists generally consider tariffs self-defeating
Tariffs raise costs for companies and consumers that rely on imports. They’re also likely to provoke retaliation.
The European Union, for example, punched back against Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium by taxing US products, from bourbon to Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Likewise, China responded to Trump’s trade war by slapping tariffs on American goods, including soybeans and pork in a calculated drive to hurt his supporters in farm country.
A study by economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Zurich, Harvard and the World Bank concluded that Trump’s tariffs failed to restore jobs to the American heartland. The tariffs “neither raised nor lowered US employment” where they were supposed to protect jobs, the study found.
Despite Trump’s 2018 taxes on imported steel, for example, the number of jobs at US steel plants barely budged: They remained right around 140,000. By comparison, Walmart alone employs 1.6 million people in the United States.
Worse, the retaliatory taxes imposed by China and other nations on US goods had “negative employment impacts”, especially for farmers, the study found. These retaliatory tariffs were only partly offset by billions in government aid that Trump doled out to farmers. The Trump tariffs also damaged companies that relied on targeted imports.
If Trump’s trade war fizzled as policy, though, it succeeded as politics. The study found that support for Trump and Republican congressional candidates rose in areas most exposed to the import tariffs – the industrial Midwest and manufacturing-heavy Southern states like North Carolina and Tennessee.
