Remember when Donald Trump boasted that trade wars are “easy to win?”
Not so much, says J.P. Morgan.
According to the firm’s head of U.S. equity strategy, Americans are about to feel some real economic pain if Trump’s latest round of Chinese tariffs go into effect. The stable genius has absolutely no clue what he’s doing, which is to be expected coming from someone who’s bankrupted multiple businesses.
The average American household will be down $1,000 per year thanks to the newest round of tariffs on Chinese goods, according to J.P. Morgan.
The firm estimates the average annual tariff cost per household will increase from $600 from the first two rounds of tariffs. The new tariffs are scheduled to begin Sept. 1 and in mid-December.
Do you remember the GOP Tax Scam, which lavished the wealthiest among us with huge tax cuts, and threw the rest of the American people a few crumbs? As the new Chinese tariffs loom, as well as those on Mexican tomatoes, experts say those measly crumbs could be totally wiped out.
The math works like this: The Tax Cuts & Jobs Act delivered tax savings to the average American family of about $930 per year, according to the Tax Policy Center. But so far, the tariffs alone on Chinese imports are adding costs of $831 for the average family in the U.S., according to economists at the New York Federal Reserve.
Unlike Trump’s farm subsidies payoffs to farmers, there isn’t a way to compensate the American consumer to offset these large increases in consumer prices.
And how about of those those payoffs to farmers? The payoffs are functioning just like the GOP Tax Scam, with more than half of the bailout funds going to less than 100 farmers. This shouldn’t surprise anyone.
According to a report released (July 30) by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG), most of the $8.4 billion given out so far in last year’s farm bailout went to wealthy farmers, exacerbating the economic disparity with smaller farmers.
An EWG analysis found that the top one-tenth of recipients received 54 percent of all payments. Eighty-two farmers have each so far received more than $500,000 in trade relief.
One farm, DeLine Farm Partnership of Charleston, Mo., has so far received $2.8 million.
The top 1 percent of recipients of trade relief received, on average, $183,331. The bottom 80 percent received, on average, less than $5,000, EWG said.
With economic fundamentals like these, it’s no surprise that we are likely headed towards a recession. Trump’s trade war, meanwhile, is only making things worse, despite the fact that he inherited an economy that was getting stronger and headed in the right direction.
