Trade War Means Higher Prices, Fewer Customers for This Vermont Distillery: ‘It’s Just Chaos’

From her distillery on the banks of Vermont’s Mad River, Mimi Buttenheim is worried about a very different stream of madness—one that doesn’t pour down from the picturesque Green Mountains, but directly out of the White House.

“This isn’t a policy. This is just a sort of shoot-from-the-hip kind of gut reaction. There’s no strategy here at all,” she says of President Donald Trump’s trade war, which is threatening to raise prices (due to tariffs) on critical inputs and turn away many of the Canadian tourists that she counts on as customers.

“I don’t see any long-term goal except chaos,” Buttenheim told Reason. “It’s just chaos, and we’re trying to—as business owners—we’re trying to react to it on a day-to-day basis.”

Buttenheim is the president of Mad River Distillers, which opened in a converted horse farm in Warren, Vermont, in 2013 and has grown to be one of the larger craft distilleries in the state. Between the main distillery and a new tasting room in Burlington, about an hour north, Mad River employs 14 people and churns out 8,000 cases of whiskey, brandy, and other spirits each year.

But even a small, craft operation like Mad River is part of the global system of commerce that Trump is determined to upend. Buttenheim tells Reason that Mad River sources its whiskey bottles from Europe via an importer in Montreal. Other essential packaging products, like cardboard boxes, also cross the border from Canada. Those suppliers are now telling her that price increases are coming, even though no one seems to be sure exactly what tariffs will be charged—as the Trump administration’s trade policies are constantly shifting.

“I think the uncertainty is the hardest part because it makes it very difficul

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Article from Reason.com

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