Trump has a new commercial agreement that triples taxes on Americans who buy British products

Washington – President Donald Trump boasted on Thursday of a new commercial agreement that, on average, triples the taxes that Americans will have to pay for British imports while pointing out that the highest tariffs will be the standard for agreements with other countries as well.

According to a table used by Trump, the new commercial agreement with the United Kingdom will bring $ 6 billion in “external income”, a term that he and his administration use dishonestly to describe the payments collected by US customs of US importers. The new 10% rate for almost all goods, which was announced last month for countries around the world, is three times greater than the average rate of 3.4% that Americans have paid for the goods of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

“It is an anti-commercio agreement,” said Scott Lincicome, director of Economics of the Center for Commercial Policies Studies of the Cato Institute.

He and other economists said that Trump’s description of that 10% rate as the minimum level of taxes for all the next commercial agreements makes the United States a high -target country and will be a continuous drag for the economy.

“That is largely in line with my fears,” said Jason Furman, an economist from Obama’s White House and now a professor at Harvard University. “The best case arises from Trump with an average rate of 12% in the world. That has returned to the 1940s and the pair with Iran and Venezuela.”

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The economist of the University of Michigan, Justin Wolfers, said: “A 10% general rate is ridiculously high, and approximately five or ten times higher than any of our commercial partners.”

Trump said he agreed to reduce his 25% tax in 10% imported cars for the first 100,000 cars that enter from the United Kingdom each year to help the British automotive industry because he mainly produces high -end luxury cars. “They make a very small amount of cars that are super luxurious, and that includes Bentley and Jaguar,” he said.

In return, the United Kingdom agreed to open its market to American beef and other agricultural products, Trump said. “We are a very large country. We have a lot of beef. We are a very large country,” he added.

Trump also continued to press his repeated lies about how international trade works, affirming, again, that the United States “loses” money when Americans buy foreign goods and that other countries pay US tariffs.

“That means that we lose less money,” he said when asked during a photo opportunity of the Oval of the Office on the sending of traffic that falls into the ports and workers of the US docks. Uu. Fearing for his works. “Look, China was doing more than a billion of 1.1 billion, in my opinion. You know, different numbers of 500 billion to 1 billion or 1.1 billion. And, frankly, if we did not do business, we would have been better.”

Then he repeated a favorite falsehood over the years on the rates that he imposed on Chinese imports during his first mandate: “China paid hundreds of billions of dollars in rates, when I was president.”

Actually, foreign nations do not pay any of those rates. American importers do it, manufacturers predominantly buy raw and retail materials. Both transmit import taxes in the form of higher prices paid by consumers.

If all tariffs announced by Trump in its so -called “day of release” on April 2, it will cost US importers and consumers $ 2.4 additional billion in new taxes for a decade.