Trump’s New Tariffs on These 3 Countries Look Particularly Foolish
Many things about the Trump administration’s new global tariffs make little sense.
Those tariffs are a huge tax increase on American consumers and businesses—one that will raise taxes by $1.8 trillion and lower incomes by over 2 percent, according to the Tax Foundation’s analysis. The White House seems to have used some fuzzy math in calculating those tariff rates. Trump is also, somehow, putting tariffs on countries inhabited solely by penguins—which has, in fairness, spurred robust growth in the manufacturing of memes. It is all very silly and largely self-destructive.
Yet, even by those standards, some of these new tariffs are truly outlandish. In the interest of narrowing down the chaos into a few bite-sized morsels, here are the three country-specific tariffs that make the least sense, based on what Trump himself has said are the guiding principles behind his new trade policies.
Singapore
For weeks, the White House has been using the word reciprocal to describe these new tariffs. “They charge us, we charge them,” is how Trump described the tariffs on Wednesday.
If that’s true, then the U.S. should be lowering its trade barriers with Singapore, which charges zero tariffs on U.S. imports. (Indeed, Singapore’s very existence is proof of the power of free trade. It has become one of the world’s wealthiest nations not because it built a ton of factories or engaged in a lot of protectionist policies but by embracing low tariffs and free trade.)
Instead, Trump is slapping a 10 percent tariff on imports from Singapore. So much for “reciprocity.”
You could say the same thing about Israel, which earlier this week decided to eliminate all tariffs on American imports in advance of Trump’s tariff announcement. Did Trump respond to that move by lowering all American tariffs on imports from Israel? He did not: Israeli goods are n
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