This is superb by Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA08); well worth reading/watching.
“Ambassador Greer you have a most awful job trying to convince us and the people we represent that the president’s trade policies are wise and measured when the truth is they are stupid and bad.
The last time the US started a trade war, Smoot-Hawley tariffs, June 1930, the world DID retaliate, and we [got] the Great Depression that lasted 10 years.
I want to quickly run through a few of the ways the logic behind the Trump tariffs make no sense. You got the math wrong. According to the people whose research you cited, Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record a New York Times article by former Treasury Official Brent Nyman titled “The Trump White House cited my research to justify tariffs it got it all wrong.” The math error had the effect of quadrupling the tariffs Trump applied on some of our biggest trading partners.
Trump exempted some goods, notably oil, but not others, including things we simply cannot produce in the United States. Why tariff bananas? Why tariff cocoa? Why tariff coffee? We don’t have the capacity to produce these things at a scale that meets domestic demand.
Trump logic equates any trade deficit with cheating; in fact, he called it rape. But even this stupid logic didn’t help Australia or Brazil or Singapore, all countries with whom we have a trade surplus. How does Australia negotiate an end to a trade deficit that doesn’t exist? Some countries have a deficit because we import things that we want but they’re too poor to afford our exports. Perfect example is Madagascar – we buy something like 60% of our vanilla from Madagascar, but they have one of the lowest GDP per capita rates in the world and they just can’t afford many of our products. But we just hit them with the 47% tariff.
Trump is hinting that maybe if countries lower tariffs on us, he might drop tariffs on them a little bit or some or possibly. But Vietnam, knowing that Trump was coming, massively cut their tariffs to appease him ahead of his announcement last week and instead you slapped a 46% tariff on them anyway. So what are the Vietnamese supposed to do?
Trump declared a phony national emergency and imposed tariffs on Canada to punish our closest ally for quote unquote fentanyl smuggling, despite the fact that our own government says the amount of smuggling at the northern border is vanishingly small, less than 1%. How does Canada get out of a tariff imposed on them for doing something that we admit they’re not doing?
Trump is risking our economy to bring back factory jobs that pay far less than the 8 million jobs that are listed in the JOLTS report right now – 8 million jobs available in America that pay far more in fast growing sectors like healthcare, clean energy or data science. The Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnik is on television raving about shifting millions of Americans to work on, and I quote, screwing in little screws to make iPhones.
You guys are blasting nearly every product from nearly every country with these tariffs. Senator Tillis yesterday called it quote a trade war on all fronts: it hurts our alliances, it hurts our economy, it hurts our ability to make and keep free trade agreements which is supposedly your job. Ambassador Greer, the world is watching you. They’re watching this hearing across the country. Global markets are in chaos. The US economy and our most important alliances are in serious danger.
I had met a couple of nights ago with a dozen ambassadors from Eastern Asia and the conclusion of the discussion was that we are creating a unipolar Asia, an Asia led by China, with America excluded. America First is America alone.
And meanwhile, you’re now serving as acting head of both the office of special counsel and the office of government ethics. These are both busy jobs in the best of times, but extremely demanding during one of the most ethically challenged presidential administrations in history. It’s absurd to think that you’re actually doing these jobs. But I think it’s fair to ask if the many hats you’re supposedly wearing are causing dangerous mistakes that damage our country in ways that’s going to be difficult to recover from.
You know, President Trump also imposed tariffs on China. China responded with tariffs on agriculture. European Union today announced 21 billion dollars worth of new retaliatory tariffs on us. China’s announced 84% retaliatory tariffs on us. The legal pretext you said is that this is a national emergency. You refer to the state of emergency as quote the largest and persistent trade deficit that’s built up in recent years. The actual emergency is that markets are slumping, consumer confidence is crashing and financial forecasts of recession are coming pretty quickly. And the Fed is projecting that these tariffs are driving prices up. We finally got inflation down, now we’re going to do exactly the opposite. Coming to the table, I don’t know. Our trade balance has been in the negative for 50 years and yet we’ve built the strongest economy in the history of mankind. This is a terrible way to fix the way of bringing back meaningful employment to our low-income Americans. This is not the way to do it.”
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