Congressman Jake Auchincloss (D-Newton) has a message for President Joe Biden’s administration: reduce tariffs against China.
With the rising cost of consumer goods and high inflation in the United States, Auchincloss thinks freer trade with one of its top trading partners is a good idea — despite problems between the two countries.
Auchincloss held a virtual town hall on Facebook Live last week, during which someone asked him if given the inflationary pressures the United States faces if the country should drop the Trump-era tariffs against China that date from 2018 — tariffs that remain in place under President Joe Biden.
Auchincloss, who supports free trade, said the tariffs are a regressive tax on American consumers.
“I love the question: No, they do not make sense,” Auchincloss said during the virtual town hall Monday, November 8. “I — Tariffs are a fancier word for taxes and they’re taxes on consumers and particularly lower-income consumers who tend to pay a higher of their wallet on consumer goods and consumption in general, actually. No, they do not make sense. And I’ll add another dimension here: they especially don’t make sense when given that so much of our clean energy technology from batter components to solar panel parts come from China. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.
“We want global trade,” he added. “We want to have a robust trading relationship with one of the largest economies in the world. But when we slap on tariffs to that and we get retribution tariffs on the other side there, it increases costs for consumers on both sides of the ocean as well as slows down our progress towards a clean energy economy. We should get rid of these tariffs.”
While Trump and Biden both support forms of protectionism in trade, economists on both the left and right tend to support free trade, as The New York Times points out. They argue that on balance, free trade is beneficial because it creates more jobs than it kills — even if it leads to job displacement in some parts of the country — and it saves consumers money.
Opponents of free trade, who come from both the left and right, argue that free trade kills jobs, depresses wages, leads to exploitation of foreign workers, and helps cause environmental harm. Opponents also argue that domestic production of certain goods is vital for national security and that infant industries grow better domestically with trade protections in place.
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