로버트 라이시 Robert Reich 의 트럼프 관세 정책 비판 2018년 ~ 2025년
7년전, 2018년 Robert Reich , 관세 정책 비판. 트럼프 관세, 역진세이다.
Trump's China tariffs are a regressive tax on Americans and risk a recession
This article is more than 7 years oldRobert Reich
Robert Reich
By imposing tariffs, Trump has in effect raised taxes on most Americans and made them poorer
Mon 10 Dec 2018 11.00 GMT
“Iam a Tariff Man,” Trump tweeted last week. “When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so…. We are right now taking in $billions in Tariffs. MAKE AMERICA RICH AGAIN.”
I’m sorry, Mr President, but you got this wrong. Tariffs are paid by American consumers. About half the $200bn worth of goods you’ve already put tariffs on come almost exclusively from China, which means American consumers are taking a hit this holiday season.
These tariffs function exactly like taxes. By imposing them, you have in effect raised taxes on most Americans. You have made Americans poorer.
Worse yet, they’re regressive. The middle class and poor pay a larger percentage of their incomes on these tariffs than do the rich.
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I needn’t remind you that your Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, passed last year, slashed taxes on big corporations and the rich by about $150bn annually. You claimed it would cause companies to invest more in America and thereby create more American jobs. They didn’t. (See General Motors.)
They spent most of their tax savings buying back their own shares of stock. This gave the stock market a steroidal boost. Not surprisingly, the boost was temporary. Last week the stock market erased all its gains for 2018, and worse may be in store. The whole American economy is slowing.
Your tariffs could put us into a recession. The world’s other big economies are slowing, too. In 1930, congressmen Smoot and Hawley championed isolationist tariffs that President Herbert Hoover signed into law. They deepened the Great Depression.
Your economic advisers are trying to put the best possible face on all this, arguing that your tariffs are designed to improve your bargaining leverage with China.
The middle class and poor pay a larger percentage of their incomes on these tariffs than do the rich
But your recent US-China trade deal is already unraveling. More accurately, the deal never happened. Your claims about Beijing agreeing to buy more US agriculture and natural gas weren’t backed up by your own administration or the Chinese government. Sort of like your “great” deal with Kim Jung-un.
Some of your advisers say your real aim isn’t about trade at all. It’s to get China to stop stealing American technology. This presumably was the reason behind last week’s arrest of the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei Technology. (Hint: That arrest won’t make it any easier to reach an agreement with China.)
I’m not sure why you’re so interested in helping American corporations protect their technology, anyway. That technology doesn’t belong to the United States. It belongs to those corporations and their shareholders. They develop and share it all over the world.
Most of these corporations have been willing to share their technology with China in joint ventures with Chinese companies, because that’s the price of entering the lucrative Chinese market. They still come away making lots of money.
Of course, they could make even more if the Chinese didn’t take the technology. So maybe, as with the tax cut, you just want to make big corporations richer.
But let me give you the benefit of the doubt. I’m going to assume your real concern is America’s national security, and that this whole “tariff man” blunderbuss is designed to prevent China from racing ahead of us in technologies that are critical to national defense.
John Bolton, your national security adviser, has said the real issue is “a question of power”, and the theft of intellectual property has “a major impact on China’s economic capacity and therefore on its military capacity”. Bolton advises you, right?
But if this is your real motive – and, quite frankly, I can’t come up with another reasonable one – might I suggest a better way to protect national security?
You have the authority to stop foreign corporations from buying any American corporation whose technology is critical to national security. So why not prohibit American corporations that possess such critical technology from sharing it with China, even if that’s the price of gaining access to China’s lucrative market?
Bar them from entering into joint ventures with Chinese corporations, prevent them from teaming up with Chinese state-owned companies, and demand that they guard their technology, under penalty of law.
Sure, these America corporations would have to sacrifice some profits, but so what? Your job isn’t to make them more profitable. It’s to protect the United States. And isn’t this a better way to protect American security than to impose a hugely regressive tax on average Americans and risk a global recession?
Robert Reich’s latest book is The Common Good and his new documentary, Saving Capitalism, is available on Netflix.
2025년 3월.
Trump’s tariffs will be paid by the poor – while his tax cuts help the rich
This article is more than 10 months old
Robert Reich
The math doesn’t work in the president’s economic promises, which will create a giant upward transfer of wealth
Sat 15 Mar 2025 11.00 GMT
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Donald Trump apparently believes his tariffs will bring so much money to the US treasury that the US will be able to afford another giant Trump tax cut.
But Trump’s tariffs – and the retaliatory tariffs already being imposed on American exports by the nation’s trading partners – will be paid largely by the American working class and poor.
And the people who will benefit most from another giant Trump tax cut are America’s wealthy.
It will be a giant upward transfer of wealth.
Trump has made astronomical estimates about how much money tariffs can raise.
“We will take in trillions and trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before,” he said during his recent joint address to Congress. “Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again.”
Last Sunday on Air Force One, Trump was even more ebullient. “We’re going to become so rich you’re not going to know where to spend all that money,” he said.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that if Trump’s already-announced tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada went into effect, they would bring about $120bn a year into the US treasury, and $1.3tn over the course of 10 years.
Among Trump’s first actions at the outset of his second term was to order the treasury to establish an “External Revenue Service” to collect tariff revenue that would enable the US to pay down its debt and reduce taxes.
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s secretary of commerce, said on Fox News in late February that the goal of the External Revenue Service “is very simple: to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay”.
In other words: the US will raise so much money from Trump’s tariffs that Americans will no longer need to pay income taxes.
The first problem with this is mathematical. America raises about $3tn each year from income taxes. The nation also imports about $3tn worth of goods each year.
Trump keeps saying other countries pay for tariffs. That’s not how they work
So to replace income taxes, tariffs would have to be at least 100% on all imported goods. Also, Americans would have to continue to import $3tn worth of goods every year. Neither of these is remotely plausible.
The second problem is who pays.
Trump keeps saying other countries pay for tariffs. That’s not how they work.
Tariffs are in effect taxes on imported products. They’re paid by Americans.
Say there’s a 60% tariff on Chinese imports. When Walmart imports Mr Coffee machines from China (where they’re made), China doesn’t pay the 60% tariff to the US government. Walmart does.
If Walmart had bought the coffee machine for $20 before the tariff, the 60% tariff requires Walmart to pay an extra $12 – bringing the total cost of each coffee machine to $32.
Walmart doesn’t want that extra $12 to cut into its profit margin, so it will try not to absorb that cost. Instead, it will pass the extra $12 on to its customers.
Walmart’s CEO has already said it expects to raise prices in response to Trump’s tariffs in order to protect its profits.
Now, targeted tariffs can be used to protect industries critical to national security.
This is what the Biden administration did when it levied tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, solar panels, computer chips and batteries after making massive domestic investments in these technologies.
But Trump has proposed across-the-board tariffs on almost all imports – particularly from America’s largest trading partners.
While Americans will pay more for imported goods due to tariffs, countries that export the products to America are also harmed because Americans presumably will buy fewer of their coffee makers and anything else they sell in the United States that now costs more. These countries are retaliating by raising tariffs on American exports.
On Monday, China began imposing tariffs on a range of American farm products, including a 15% levy on chicken, wheat and corn.
These retaliatory tariffs will hurt America’s farm belt – mostly Republican states and Trump voters.
On Wednesday, after Trump imposed a 25% tariff on all aluminum and steel imports coming into the United States from the rest of the world, the European Union announced retaliatory tariffs on about $28bn worth of American exports, including beef and whiskey.
Not incidentally, Europe’s retaliatory tariffs are on goods mostly produced by Republican states (think Kentucky bourbon). Europe is also slapping tariffs on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, made in America’s rust belt.
On Thursday, in response to Europe’s tariffs, Trump threatened a 200% tariff on all alcoholic products from EU member states. If he follows through, Trump voters will be paying more for much of the alcohol they consume.
Canada also announced new tariffs on about $21bn worth of US products.
This is called a trade war. There are no winners in such a war.
One of the biggest global trade wars started with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930. After the 1929 stock market crash, President Herbert Hoover and Republicans thought sweeping tariffs would help the economy.
They didn’t. Import prices surged, and exports plummeted because of other nations’ retaliatory tariffs. Global trade fell by 66%, worsening the Great Depression.
Smoot-Hawley seemed to prove that across-the-board tariffs don’t work. Then came Trump’s first term and his sweeping tariffs, largely on China.
Higher prices from Trump’s first-term tariffs on thousands of Chinese imports are estimated to have cost American families close to $80bn.
This cost took a larger chunk out of the incomes of poorer families than richer ones.
If you make $50,000 a year, the cost of a coffee maker that rises due to tariffs affects you more than it does someone making $1m a year who can better afford the price increase.
To put it another way, tariffs are a highly regressive tax.
Following Trump’s first-term tariffs on China, Beijing retaliated with its own tariffs on American exports. This led China to import less from America.
In the US agriculture industry alone, the result was a $27bn loss in exports from mid-2018 to the end of 2019. Even though the government increased aid to affected farmers, farm bankruptcies shot up 20%.
Another consequence of Trump’s first-term trade war was that American manufacturing shrank, as demand for exports slumped and as raw materials used in manufacturing became more expensive.
One study estimates that Trump’s first-term trade war cost nearly 300,000 American jobs.
Instead of learning a lesson from this fiasco, Trump is now promising even bigger tariffs – more tariff hikes on China and, starting on 2 April, 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico.
These new tariffs would cost the typical American household an additional $1,200 this year. If Trump makes good on previous pledges to slap more tariffs on imports from around the world in addition to aluminum and steel, American families can expect to spend as much as $4,000 more.
Trump says he’ll use the revenue from tariffs to “offset” more of his big pending tax cut.
That tax cut will disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans and big corporations, as did Trump’s first-term tax cut. But revenue raised from tariffs will be coming disproportionately from average working people.
Hence, it will be a massive transfer of wealth from most Americans to the super wealthy and giant corporations.
Will most Americans know that the higher prices they’ll pay for groceries, gas, housing and all sorts of other things will be going into the pockets of the wealthy? Will they know whom to blame?
Trump was able to fool most Americans during his first term into believing he had created a marvelous economy for them and that they benefited from his tariffs and tax cuts.
It was a lie, of course. But he tells lots of lies that many Americans believe. Will he be able to do it again, on a much larger scale?
