There’s nothing quite like dipping a chocolate chip cookie into a tall glass of…steel?
The Trump administration’s 50 percent tariffs on imported steel and aluminum were expanded this week to cover hundreds of imports that plainly are not steel or aluminum. Among the items targeted by the new tariffs: dairy products like milk and cream, as well as gasoline and other fuels, fire extinguishers, baby strollers, furniture, engines, and motorcycles. In short, anything that contains steel or aluminum or that is (as with dairy products) transported or stored in steel or aluminum containers could now be subject to those massive import taxes.
“Auto parts, chemicals, plastics, furniture components—basically, if it’s shiny, metallic, or remotely related to steel or aluminum, it’s probably on the list,” Brian Baldwin, vice president of customs for Kuehne+Nagel International, a logistics firm, wrote in a post on LinkedIn.
Officially, the Commerce Department says the 407 new product categories covered by the tariffs are “derivative” of steel and aluminum. Only the steel and aluminum components of the imports will actually be taxed.
In reality, however, this is a wild expansion of how tariffs typically apply.
“Many of these new [Harmonized Tariff Schedule] HTS provisions would not normally be considered aluminum or steel derivative products,” notes Michael Roll, a trade attorney for Deringer, an international logistics firm, “at least not by any reasonable understanding of those words.”
But why should the Trump administration be constrained by the reasonable understanding of words? After all, this is the same administration that’s claiming the authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that does not contain the word “tariff” within its text and that has never been used for this purpose. For that matter, the tariffs on steel and aluminum have been imposed under the guise of a “national security” claim that suggests trade with longtime allies like Canada and the European Union is somehow a threat to the United States.
If you’re willing to buy all that, you’ll probably be able to talk yourself into believing that milk from Canada or deodorant from France is also a threat to national security and might as well be considered steel or aluminum.
Anyone who retains the ability to think logically about this stuff, however, should be annoyed, at a minimum.
But, wait, it actually gets worse. When it announced the expanded list of products that would be covered by the steel and aluminum tariffs, the Commerce Department also created a new process for deciding whether even more products ought to be covered by those same tariffs. Beginning next month, there will be three annual “windows”—in January, May, and September—when companies can petition the Commerce Department for more tariffs on their competitors’ goods.
That’s great news for lobbyists and trade lawyers, who are already keeping plenty busy during the Trump administration—registered tariff lobbyists have reported a 599 percent increase in revenue this year, according to one analysis.
That’s exactly what you’d expect to see in the current political dynamic. If tariffs can be raised or lowered according to the whims of one man (or those of his closest advisers and allies), then businesses that can afford to do so are going to spend handsome sums of money to influence those decisions. That’s not just borderline corrupt and obviously gross, it’s also taking resources out of the productive part of the economy and redirecting them toward the very swamp of political influence-peddling that Trump once vowed to drain.
And the result of this warped, antidemocratic process is going to be more batshit proclamations like “milk is now steel” from an administration that will use any excuse to raise taxes on American consumers of foreign-made goods. Congress must assert its powers to stop this insanity.
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