Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal.
Editor:
Your headline that reads “Trump to Hit European Nations with 10% Tariffs in Bid for Greenland Deal” (January 17) would be more accurate if it instead read “Trump to Hit Americans with 10% Tariffs in Bid for Greenland Deal.”
Because foreigners pay at most 25 percent of the cost of U.S. tariffs, for every dollar of cost that the president inflicts on Europeans to pressure them into ‘selling’ Greenland, he inflicts at least three dollars of cost on us Americans. Perhaps he believes that this cost is one that we should be willing to pay. If so, though, why doesn’t Mr. Trump come clean with us about the cost that he’s inflicting on us? By asserting that certain European countries “will be charged a 10% Tariff on any and all goods and services sent to the United States of America,” without any mention of the larger cost inflicted on Americans, he reveals either that he’s unaware that Americans will bear this cost or that he wishes to keep Americans in the dark about this reality. Neither possibility is encouraging about his leadership.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
