Couching its criticism in a willingness to work with the Trump administration on issues of American competitiveness, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers said President’s Trump announcement of 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico and 10% on China will drive up costs for U.S. manufacturers and disrupt supply chains.
In a statement, Kip Eideberg, SVP, said:
“President Trump is right to focus on securing our border and protecting American communities. But levying tariffs on goods that U.S. equipment manufacturers depend on not only jeopardizes the President’s agenda, including the Trump Administration’s plan for a stronger, more competitive America, but drives up costs for U.S. equipment manufacturers, disrupts our supply chains, and exposes our customers to retaliatory tariffs.
“Equipment manufacturers stand ready to work with the Trump Administration on a trade strategy that holds bad actors accountable, safeguards the benefits of the successful United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and bolsters equipment manufacturing in North America.”
Industry Week reported that the American Farm Bureau sent Trump a letter last week, saying tariffs could make it difficult to sell U.S. good abroad.
“Last year, the U.S. exported over $30 billion in agricultural products to Mexico, $29 billion to Canada, and $26 billion to China–our top three markets by value combined for half of total agricultural exports,” Industry Week reported Duvall as saying in the letter. “Any effort to impose additional tariffs on these nations’ imports runs the risk of significant retaliatory measures against U.S. agricultural exports.”
Duvall also noted that Canada supplies U.S. farmers with much of the fertilizer used on crops, and “increases to the cost of these necessary products, with spring planting soon starting across rural America, would be a difficult and untimely burden on American farmers.”
Left: How might fleet managers fight inflation from tariffs?
Industry Week also quoted the Coalition for a Prosperous America, an advocacy group that praised the move on tariffs.
Industry Week quoted CPA chairman Zach Mottl:
“These fearmongering arguments come from the same economists funded by multinational corporations who have been dead wrong on trade policy for decades. They’re the same ‘experts’ who told us that NAFTA would create nearly 200,000 jobs, but instead, it wiped out 1 million American jobs. They said Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) with China would be a win for the U.S., but their predictions were off by a factor of seven—and it led to the biggest industrial collapse in modern history.”
The article referenced in this story originally ran as “Condemnation of Trump’x New Tariffs from Auto, Consumer Goods Groups” on IndustryWeek.com, an Endeavor Business Media sibling site.
