Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) tried — and failed — during deliberations in the Senate over a spending and debt deal to secure a framework for new import taxes on goods from China. In general, these additional expenses are paid by the interests doing the importing — meaning that Hawley’s plan would have slapped Americans with huge taxes. A full 81 Senators voted no.
Hawley’s proposal was in the form of an amendment to the underlying deal to raise the nation’s debt limit as required to appropriately accommodate past expenses to which the federal government has been committed. If enacted, the tariffs for which his plan called would have been activated in circumstances where the value of articles imported from China exceeds the value of such goods exported from the United States to that country. Though it’s an easy metric, it doesn’t seem like this idea is necessarily a reasonable reflection of the global economy, as the U.S. may move into further economic activities that aren’t necessarily captured by measuring the monetary value of articles exported to a single country.
Hawley’s plan would have instituted 25 percent taxes on “each article imported into the United States from the People’s Republic of China,” seemingly without meaningful exception. The measurement of 25 percent would have been calculated based upon the understood value of the item being taxed.
Donald Trump, behind whom Hawley has often stood, has himself promoted the idea of steep tariffs — and amid doing so, Trump has often utterly failed to grasp what’s actually going on. He has characterized the funds raised under such taxes as coming from China (or whatever country has their exports affected by his enacted or proposed plan), but that’s not how it works. Americans pay these costs. Trump’s general ineptitude amid critical issues of foreign policy dramatically undercuts any credibility for his assertions he could have somehow stopped the war between Russia and Ukraine if still president.
