During Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” Jared Bernstein, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said that the tariffs on China announced by President Joe Biden differ from the approach taken by former President and 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump because Biden’s tariffs would only apply to sectors that “are barely importing from China.”
Bernstein said, “I think the difference between the tariffs that President Biden has put in place is that they are narrowly targeted, very precisely targeted tariffs. They are targeted at exports, and very little of our imports from China. Just under 4% of our imports, as the president recently announced. On electric vehicles, the president has put a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles, but we import less than 400 million of them in the U.S. So that’s pretty much zero, given that we have a $28 trillion economy. Meanwhile, the former president has put incredibly broad, not targeted, tariffs, 60% on everything from China and 10% on everything imported. Let’s stop calling it a tariff, let’s call it a tax.” It’s a tax on consumer spending that will hit middle-class families and have an inflationary effect that is the exact opposite of what we’ve been talking about with this president’s policies. …Even the estimates by former members of the Trump campaign say it will raise inflation. So this is just the wrong direction.”
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