Trump Tariffs ‘$600 Billion Tariff for Single World Trade Market’, National Association of Manufacturers ‘Opposes’
While supporters of Trump’s tariffs in the US cheered the ‘achievement of $600 billion tariffs as a single world trade market,’ the largest US manufacturing organization, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), issued a statement opposing it, while Colombia in South America declared the ‘end of neoliberalism’ and Brazil announced ‘complaints against the WTO.’
“Today’s announcement was complex, and manufacturers are scrambling to understand the exact impact on their operations,” said Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, in a statement on the 2nd. “The stakes for manufacturers could not be higher. Many US manufacturers already operate on low margins. The high costs of the new tariffs threaten investment, jobs, supply chains, and, as a result, the ability of the US to overtake other countries and become a manufacturing superpower.”
In a press release, NAM officially responded to Trump’s tariff policy with three demands: <1) Minimize tariff costs for manufacturers investing and expanding in the United States; 2) Ensure tariff-free access to critical inputs that manufacturers use to make goods in the United States; and 3) Negotiate “zero-for-zero” tariffs on American products in trading partner markets.
NAM stated that the “zero-for-zero” demand by American manufacturers means “they don’t charge us, and we don’t charge them.”
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) is the largest manufacturing association in the United States, representing small, medium, and large manufacturers across all industries and all 50 states. The U.S. manufacturing industry employs approximately 13 million men and women, contributes $2.93 trillion to the U.S. economy each year, and accounts for 53 percent of private-sector research and development, NAM said in a press release. Nick Iacovella, vice president of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a tariff advocacy group, said on the 2nd that “today is arguably the greatest single trade and economic policy measure in American history, and it absolutely solidifies President Trump’s legacy of ushering in a new golden age of economic production and prosperity,” adding that the tariffs “will contribute to the broad reindustrialization of the United States and the creation of working-class jobs.”
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has clashed with Trump, said via X that “these tariffs mark a global milestone,” adding that “neoliberalism, which declared free trade policies to the world today, is dead.”
The Brazilian government said it was considering taking the case to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in response to President Trump’s tariff announcement, and the Brazilian Congress unanimously passed a reciprocity bill that would allow the government to retaliate against countries or trade blocs that impose tariffs on Brazilian goods, the AP reported on the 2nd.
Exiger, a supply chain mapping firm, calculated that Trump’s tariff announcement would result in $600 billion in new U.S. tariffs, most of which would come from 10 countries, The New York Times reported on the 2nd. Exiger called the tariff announcement “a monumental policy shift that will reshape sourcing, pricing and geopolitical strategy,” estimating that $149 billion in additional tariffs would be imposed on Chinese exports, $63 billion on Vietnamese products, $37 billion on Taiwanese products, $36 billion on Japanese products, and $41 billion on products from Germany and Ireland, for a total of $600 billion in imports.
Scott Lincicome, vice president and deputy director of trade at the conservative free-market Cato Institute, and Colin Grabow, vice president and deputy director of trade at the Cato Institute, warned in a joint statement that Trump’s justification for tariffs is “flimsy and contradictory” and that tariffs could fuel inflation and slow economic growth. “Today’s announcement would bring U.S. tariffs to levels not seen since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which sparked a global trade war and deepened the Great Depression,” Lincicome and Grabow said in a statement. Scott Lincicome is vice president for general economics at Cato’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies.
Colin Grabow is the vice president of the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, where his research focuses on domestic forms of trade protectionism, such as the Jones Act and the U.S. sugar program.
To understand why Trump’s tariffs would be so disruptive, Linthicum wrote in a report dated March 28, “Trump’s Auto Tariffs Will Hurt U.S. Consumers and Producers.” “To understand why Trump’s tariffs would be so disruptive, you have to understand how integrated the global auto industry, especially the North American industry, has become today, thanks to decades of open trade (zero tariffs, streamlined procedures, etc.),” he said. “The industry is characterized by sophisticated, highly interconnected regional supply chains that span multiple borders. In the North American supply chain, components like transmissions or engines move multiple times between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico before they are finally integrated into a finished vehicle. When tariffs are applied to an integrated market, costs are not simply incremental, but compounded.” “Multiple tariffs on a single component can exponentially increase overall manufacturing costs,” he said in the report, adding that “automotive seat capacitors cross borders five times, while Canadian manufacturer Linamar, which produces transmissions through plants in the U.S., Mexico and Canada, has components that cross three borders seven times before the transmissions are finally assembled in Michigan.”
The US Republican Party’s hard-line conservative strategy of a single global market started with the free trade agreement (FTA) in Chile, a weak trading country, and strengthened with Chile and exporting country Korea signing an FTA, thereby attempting to break the regional bloc trade agreement led by Europe and China, and Korea’s disguised progressives took the lead in shaking the international system as a “FTA propagator.”
The Trump administration is transforming the existing trade system into a single trade structure of a single global market under the US through tariff attacks in the “America First” strategy of ultra-hard-line conservatives, and Korea, unlike Japan, is taking a bigger hit from the tariff offensive.
President Trump called it “Liberation Day” when the S&P index plunged by about 5% in the stock market due to the tariff attack. He then said, “The surgery went well and I am recovering.”
On the 3rd, the day after the imposition of global tariffs, President Trump said, “Import tariffs have given the US influence,” and “Every country has called us. That is the beauty of what we do. We're in the driver's seat. If we had asked some of these countries, most of these countries, to do us a favor, they would have said no. Now they will do anything for us," he said.