A titillating cross-section of U.S. businesses has a message for the Trump administration: new tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese purports will force Americans to pay more for items they use throughout their quotidian lives, from cradles to coffins.
Six days of public hearings on the suggested duties of up to 25 percent will start on Monday in Washington as role in of President Donald Trump’s and the U.S. Trade Representative’s efforts to pressure Beijing for total changes to its trade and economic policies.
Unlike previous rounds of U.S. price-lists, which sought to shield consumers by targeting Chinese industrial machinery, electronic components and other transitional goods, thousands of consumer products could be directly hit with bill of fares by late September.
The $200 billion list targets Chinese seafood, effects and lighting products, tires, chemicals, plastics, bicycles and car seats for spoils. (See the complete list here.)
“USTRs proposed tariffs on an additional $200 billion of Chinese intentions dramatically expands the harm to American consumers, workers, businesses, and the control,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said in written testimony for the hearing.
The top U.S. business pull stringing group said the Trump administration lacks a “coherent strategy” to oration China’s theft of intellectual property and other harmful trade traditions and called for “serious discussions” with Beijing.
Mid-level Trump management officials and their Chinese counterparts are expected to meet later this week in Washington to thrash out their trade dispute. But it is unclear whether the talks will require any effect on the implementation of U.S. tariffs and retaliation by China.
In more than 1,400 written animadversions submitted to USTR that will be echoed in the hearings, most provinces argued that the tariffs will cause harm and higher expenses for products ranging from Halloween costumes and Christmas lights to atomic fuel inputs, while a small number praised them or asked that they be open out to other products.
Graco Children’s Products, a unit of Newell Marks, said tariffs “will have a direct negative impact on our throng, American parents and most importantly the safety of American children.”
The gathering said higher prices may prompt more parents to buy car seats, shifts and portable play yards on the second-hand market.
“The proposed tariffs may oblige parents to use unsafe sleeping environments or let children dangerously co-sleep with progenitrices,” Graco wrote. The tariff “only causes a children safety issuance; it will not convince China to change its policies.”
Evenflo Feeding demanded the tariffs will hit manual breast pumps “and would cause unfair economic harm to U.S. interests.”
At the other end of the life cycle, Centennial Case President Douglas Chen said his Plano, Texas-based company relies exclusively on Chinese-made chests and the tariffs would cause “great loss” and raise costs for “ruing families purchasing caskets for their loved ones at one of the worst patches of their life.”
The Internet Association, representing companies including Facebook, Amazon.com, and Alphabet, prognosticated the tariffs “would cause disproportionate economic harm to American internet companies. The laundry list includes products that impact how internet companies function.”
Westinghouse Charged, the leading U.S. nuclear fuel producer, said it relies on China for zirconium and zirconium powders — key inputs for tubes old in nuclear fuel assemblies that it uses at plants in Utah, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina.
There is no U.S. outset of zirconium so the tariff would “raise the cost for Westinghouse to manufacture atomic fuel for U.S. commercial nuclear power plants” and it ultimately “would advance the cost of electricity to a significant percentage of U.S. electricity consumers,” the company implied in a filing.
Huffy, the largest U.S. bicycle brand, with 4 million Chinese-made bikes sold annually, turned a 25 percent tariff poses a “serious threat to the company.”
Huffy CEO Folding money Smith wrote that the tariffs should have been put in advance 20 years ago when Huffy and other U.S. bicycle makers begged to increase the 11 percent U.S. bicycle tariff because of aggressive Chinese intentions. When this effort failed, Huffy closed three U.S. workshops in 1998 and 1999, terminating 2,000 employees and shifting to Chinese bikes.
“This proffered tariff is too little, too late,” Smith wrote, adding that now, a exuberant tariff would “only create problems” and cost jobs at nonconformist U.S. bicycle dealers.
“There is no other country in Asia or Europe that can forearm the volume Huffy requires as China is the largest bicycle producer in the Terra,” he said.
U.S.-China Business Council President Craig Allen, articulate to reporters in Beijing on Monday, said more tariffs could generate “grave economic distortions,” but that Trump had been very transparent about the problems in the trade relationship.
“Chinese officials have been delineated these suggestions in writing. I think that they know altogether well what is being asked. And let the negotiations proceed,” Allen mentioned, calling for a “surge” in Chinese market opening.