For as long as the trade war with China has gone on, President Donald Trump has insisted that the tariffs imposed on Beijing would be paid for by that nation.
And for as long as those claims have been made, fact-checkers have demonstrated why his assessments are dead wrong.
Now, a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds statistical data that proves without a shadow of a doubt that U.S. consumers, not China, have been paying for the costs of Trump’s tariffs.
Trump has made the opposite claim throughout the length of the trade wars. In November of last year, for instance, he sent out a tweet saying as much, claiming that America was actually making money off of China having to pay for them.
“Billions of Dollars are pouring into the coffers of the U.S.A. because of the Tariffs being charged to China,” Trump said.
But according to the Federal Reserve’s report, that’s just not the case. Chinese companies, if they wanted to keep prices in the U.S. the same, would have had to “absorb” the prices by lowering them, and accounting for the 25 percent tariff that the Trump administration imposed, Reuters reported.
Americans, not Chinese, paying for Donald Trump’s tariffs, study by New York Fed shows https://t.co/VtYVOpS27I
— SCMP News (@SCMPNews) November 25, 2019
Yet the costs of Chinese goods haven’t gone down — which means the consumer, not Beijing, is paying for the tariffs.
“The continued stability of import prices for goods from China means U.S. firms and consumers have to pay the tariff,” the report stated.
It’s not all good news for China, however, nor is the U.S. coming out with a stronger hand on the issue: the trade wars have affected both countries in negative ways.
In China, trade of machinery and electrical goods to the U.S. has fallen by 2 percent, and imports on those goods from America have fallen by 6 percent.
In America, farmers are being hit hard by the trade war, and while some have been fortunate enough to be helped by Trump’s bailout to farmers, most of the $16 billion appropriated for that cause have gone to richer, more wealthier farms, the Washington Post reported.
The top 10 percent of the wealthiest farms in America have received more than half of the entire bailout, with the richest 82 farmers in the nation getting, on average, around half a million dollars each. The average farmer in the lower 80 percent of income earners, meanwhile, has received just $5,000 from the bailout.