Friday, May 4, 2018

Trump Put a Tariff on Chinese Steel; Now North Carolina Pig Farmers Could Feel Pain



This is how wacky trade wars can get, as if they weren't dumb enough from the get go.

William Douglas explains part 1:
The latest battleground in the looming U.S.-China trade war: Frozen pig parts from North Carolina.

When China announced a 25 percent tariff on U.S. pork products in retaliation to President Donald Trump’s 25 percent tariff on imported steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum, the state's pork industry shuddered.

The Beijing government’s pork tariff targets fresh or cold pig forelegs, hindquarters and the animals' meat, as well as frozen bone forelegs, legs and frozen liver....

North Carolina, which ranks second in the nation in pork production, does a small but brisk export business in pig parts.

One of its main customers is China, the world’s biggest buyer of pork byproducts. The world’s most populous nation has a hunger for offal — the parts of the pig Americans rarely eat — for soups, sausages and other dishes.
And it gets wackier, there are indications Trump may provide subsidies to farmers who are hurt by the Chinese tariffs.

Trump has said, “we’ll make it up to them” and has tasked the Department of Agriculture to develop a plan to help farmers.

In other words, the taxpayer is going to get whacked by the higher prices that will come because of tariffs on foreign steel and then they will get whacked again with more taxes to subsidize farmers hurt as a consequence of the first Trump whack.

Welcome to Trumpworld. The land of distortion mirror central planning.

-Robert Wenzel  

1 comment:

  1. You have to understand that Trump is playing 3D financial chess with a parallel universe

    ReplyDelete