June 08, 2018
The Washington Post may have wanted to make this point more clearly in reporting on Donald Trump’s statements as he headed off to the G–7 meeting in Canada. The piece noted Trump’s Twitter comment:
“‘Take down your tariffs & barriers or we will more than match you!’ he wrote on Twitter. He did not specify what products he could seek to target.”
Tariffs are of course excise taxes. The government imposes taxes on a specific product. In the 19th century, these taxes were the major source of revenue for the US government.
The imposition of tariffs may be a useful strategy to force concessions from trading partners, but that seems an unlikely outcome given Trump’s ill-defined and continually changing demands. In any case, his main weapon is to make US consumers pay more for a wide range of products.
This piece also contains the bizarre assertion that:
“His [Trump’s] view is that other countries have imposed unfair tariffs limiting US imports for decades but that the United States has unwittingly allowed those countries to bring low-cost goods into the United States, hurting US companies and American workers.”
The Washington Post’s reporters do not know what Trump’s “view” is or that he even has anything that can be called a view. They know what he says and does. This is what real newspapers report. Leave the mind reading to the tabloids.
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