This week the current inhabitant of the White House decided to involve the entire world in a trade war with China. Because China exports lots of steel and aluminum, the U.S. has just imposed a 25% tariff on imports of those materials from any country, just to make sure they don’t sneak past our borders through a secondary market.
These days the U.S. only produces about 5% of the world’s steel, but the White House wants to be nice to the Pittsburgh steel lobby, so as not to lose precious Republican votes in Pennsylvania. But as you may already know, an import tariff is essentially a way to tax the U.S. consumer.
Americans can soon expect to pay more for any product or service that requires steel or aluminum, including cars, houses, flights, hand tools, cooking utensils, medical equipment, and a long long list of other items. If you are planning to buy a home or a car, you might want to prepare yourself for sticker shock.
This might have been his plan all along. For the last four years we all thought he was saying “Stop the steal!”. But maybe the man is just bad at spelling.
After all, on the same day, he ordered the U.S. mint to stop producing pennies. And if there’s one thing we know about him, it’s that nothing he says ever makes a lot of cents.