Washington – After weeks in advance and speculation, President Donald Trump followed his tariff threats for Declare Wednesday A 10% basal tax on imports from all countries and higher tariff rates in dozens of nations that manage commercial surpluses with the United States.
By announcing what has called reciprocal tariffsTrump was fulfilling a key campaign promise by increasing US taxes to foreign goods to reduce the gap with tariffs that the White House says that other countries unfairly impose American products.
Trump’s highest rates would reach foreign entities that sell more goods to the United States than they buy. But economists do not share Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs, since they are a tax on importers that are generally transmitted to consumers. However, it is possible that reciprocal tariffs can take other countries to the table and make their own import taxes reduce.
Associated Press asked his questions about reciprocal rates. Here are some of them, along with our answers:
Tariffs are imports on imports, collected when foreign goods cross the border of the United States by the Customs and Border Protection Agency. The money, around $ 80 billion last year, goes to the treasure of the United States to help pay the expenses of the federal government. Congress has authority to say how money will be spent.
Trump, backed largely by republican legislators who control the United States Senate and the House of Representatives, wants to use an increase in tariff income to finance tax cuts that analysts say it would disproportionately benefit the rich. Specifically, they want to extend the tax cuts approved in Trump’s first mandate and largely expire at the end of 2025. The Fiscal Foundation, a group of non -partisan experts in Washington, has discovered that extending Trump’s tax cuts Reduce federal income by $ 4.5 billion From 2025 to 2034.
Trump wants higher rates to help compensate for lower taxes. Another group of experts, the Fiscal Policy Center, has said that extending the 2017 tax cuts would deliver a continuous fiscal breakdown to Americans at all income levels, “but higher income households would receive a greater benefit.”
It depends on how companies respond both in the United States and abroad, but consumers could see that general prices increase within a month or two of the tax tariffs. For some products, such as Mexico products, prices could increase much faster after tariffs enter into force.
Some retailers and other importers from the United States can eat part of the cost of the rate, and foreign exporters can reduce their prices to compensate for additional duties. But for many companies, the tariffs Trump announced Wednesday, as 20% in imports from Europe, will be too large to swallow on their own.
Companies can also use tariffs as an excuse to increase prices. When Trump slapped tasks in the washing machines in 2018, studies later showed that retailers high prices both in washing machines and dryersAlthough there were no new tasks in the dryers.
A key question in the coming months is whether something similar will happen again. Economists care that consumers, who have just lived the greatest inflation increase in four decades, are more accustomed to the increase in prices than before pandemic.
However, there are also signs that Americans, discouraged by the increase in the cost of living, are less willing to accept price increases and simply reduce their purchases. That could discourage companies to increase prices by far.
The Constitution of the United States grants the power to establish tariffs to Congress. But over the years, Congress has delegated those powers to the president through several different laws. These laws specify the circumstances under which the White House can impose tariffs, which are generally limited to cases in which imports threaten national security or are severely damaging a specific industry.
In the past, the presidents generally imposed tariffs only after carrying out public hearings to determine if certain imports met these criteria. Trump followed those steps by imposing tariffs on his first mandate.
However, in his second term, Trump has tried to use emergency powers established in a 1977 law to impose tariffs in a more ad hoc. Trump has said, for example, that the fentanil that flows from Canada and Mexico constitutes a national emergency and has used that pretext to impose 25% duties to the goods of both countries.
The Congress can try to cancel an emergency declared by a president, and Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat of Virginia, has proposed Do exactly that regarding Canada. That legislation could approve the Senate, but it would probably die in the Chamber. Other bills in Congress that would also limit the president’s authority to establish tariffs face difficult probabilities of approval as well.
American tariffs are generally lower than those charged by other countries. The United States average tariff, weighted to reflect the goods that are really negotiated, is only 2.2% for the United States, compared to 2.7% of the European Union, 3% of China and 12% of India, According to the World Trade Organization.
Other countries also tend to do more than the United States to protect their farmers with high rates. The rate weighted in the United States trade on agricultural products, for example, is 4%, compared to 8.4%of the EU, 12.6%of Japan, 13.1%of China and 65%of India. (The WTO numbers do not count the recent burst of import taxes of Trump or tariffs between countries that have signed their own free trade agreements, such as the American-Mexico-Canada agreement that allows many goods to cross the borders of North America free of taxes).
However, the Trump administration has used its own calculations to obtain much larger tariffs that say that other economies impose on the United States, for example, the White House said Wednesday that the effective tariffs of the European Union in the US. UU. They follow 39%, much higher than the NUMBER. Says the equal of 67%of China.
The previous American administrations agreed to the tariffs that Trump now calls unfair. They were the result of a long negotiation between 1986 and 1994, the so -called Ronda de Uruguay, which ended in a commercial pact signed by 123 countries and has formed the basis of the global commercial system for almost four decades.
