Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Taxes are not tariffs, yet Trump's WH claims they are to justify Trump's fetish for tariffs.

US president Trump promises ‘reciprocal tariffs’ to VAT
18 Feb 2025, 3:20 pm
[...]
William Bain, head of trade policy at the British Chamber of Commerce said the Trump administration’s proposals “will create more cost and uncertainty for investors, businesses and consumers across the world”.

“Plans to factor in countries’ VAT regimes could lead to especially complex and costly tariff scenarios which upend established trade norms,” Bain said, calling on the UK government to “adopt a flexible and agile response”, to avoid triggering a trade war, and to seek to negotiate “alternative arrangements”.

“If they do not, then sectors such as automotives, pharmaceuticals, and food and drink could be significantly hit as higher tariffs inevitably feed through into globally higher prices for consumers,” Bain said.

International trade expert Totis Kotsonis of Pinsent Masons said the US administration's assertion that the VAT amounts to a tariff that can be the subject of retaliatory measures is problematic for a few reasons.

“First, VAT is a consumer tax and, in any event, it is in line with World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, in that it applies indiscriminatory to products irrespective of whether these are imported or locally produced. Second, the idea that the US may apply different tariffs to the same product depending on its provenance, breaches the WTO's ‘most favoured nation’ principle, which requires members to offer the same tariff to all WTO members, other than in specific circumstances such as where a bilateral or plurilateral comprehensive trade agreement is in place or where trade-defence measures are justified under WTO rules – which won't be the case here.”

“There's an additional concern in that, if the US proceeds with its threat to raise tariffs on this basis, the EU is likely to retaliate one way or another. Depending on the exact measures that the US takes, the EU could seek to rely on its Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI) to impose targeted retaliatory measures that hurt for example, US strategic industries and swing states,” he said.

https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/us-president-trump-promises-reciprocal-tariffs-vat

Krugman, in the video, says if the WH decides to label anything they want to as a tariff then we are in
an all out trade war with Europe. He says, Trump's tariff obsession is incoherent, and crazy. Repeat: