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**Hugh** · 08-10-2024, 09:08

From the linked article above

Quote:

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 aluminum by taxing U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.

The Tax Foundation, a right-wing Libertarian policy research group funded by the Koch Brothers & Exxon Mobil, stated

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Candidate Trump has proposed significant tariff hikes as part of his presidential campaign; we estimate that if imposed, his proposed tariff increases would hike taxes by another $524 billion annually and shrink GDP by at least 0.8 percent, the capital stock by 0.7 percent, and employment by 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs. Our estimates do not capture the effects of retaliation, nor the additional harms that would stem from starting a global trade war.

For his previous Tariffs, they say

Quote:

Before accounting for behavioral effects, the $79 billion in higher tariffs amounts to an average annual tax increase on US households of $625. Based on actual revenue collections data, trade war tariffs have directly increased tax collections by $200 to $300 annually per US household, on average. Both estimates understate the cost to US households because they do not factor in the lost output, lower incomes, and loss in consumer choice the tariffs have caused.

https://taxfoundation.org/research/a...biden-tariffs/