Biden should axe Trump-era tariffs

President Joe Biden could quickly offer some degree of relief from inflation if he wanted to: he could repeal all tariffs implemented by President Donald Trump. Yet for some reason Biden has largely kept these tariffs in place.

“A study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a trade-focused think tank, found that repealing tariffs could reduce overall inflation by about 1 percentage point,” reported Reason Magazine.

Tariffs are taxes on imports. Whether companies pay the tariffs or adjust their operations to get their required goods from more expensive domestic sources, in the end, both they and consumers end up paying more.

After all, the costs of taxes on businesses ultimately fall on the customers.

Some of President Trump's imposition of tariffs were done largely on bogus national security grounds. Fundamentally, though, Trump, who declared himself a “tariff man,” was hoping that tariffs would help shore up domestic production.

For the reasons mentioned above, Trump failed to understand that tariffs have farreaching impacts.

While American steel and aluminum producers, for example, could conceivably benefit from tariffs, that's only one side of the ledger.

Many more businesses rely on imports and have been negatively impacted by the tariffs. This has meant job losses which exceed any job gains, higher costs to consumers and overall negative impacts to the American economy.

“We estimate the tariffs still in effect will reduce long-run GDP by 0.22 percent, wages by 0.14 percent, and employment by 173,000 full-time equivalent jobs,” reported the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

Reflective of how far-reaching tariffs can be, in April the Beer Institute noted that President Trump's national security tariffs on aluminum have cost the U.S. beverage industry $1.4 billion in tariffs.

“That means U.S. beer and beverage companies, along with many other users of aluminum, are being charged a higher price for the metal, driving up the cost of doing business in the U.S. and making consumer goods more expensive,” the group said in a statement.

President Biden can right this wrong and repeal Trump's tariffs now.