This meme was submitted as a candidate for The Week In Pictures:
I can relate. I feel reasonably conversant with Middle Eastern history, but I don’t claim to understand tariffs. For one thing, there are countless thousands of them. And which ones are important, i.e., relate to something that a given country actually wants to import? And what about non-tariff barriers, like quotas, which generally are worse? When President Trump says that other countries have high tariff barriers that exclude our products, and it is only fair that we respond, is he mostly right, or mostly wrong?
A week or more ago–I have fallen behind–Trump got unexpected support from two sources, the World Bank and the Washington Post. This is the Post: “World Bank backs Trump’s gripe over other nations’ higher tariffs on U.S. goods.”
The World Bank effectively endorsed President Donald Trump’s complaint about the high tariffs that other nations impose on American products, calling for U.S. trading partners to sharply reduce their import taxes to more closely match the lower levies typically imposed by Washington.
The president says it is unfair that American companies face higher trade barriers in Europe, Japan and China than foreign businesses confront when they sell their products in the U.S. market. The World Bank’s top economists agreed, calling for an across-the-board reduction in tariffs.
That distills the situation down nicely. This World Bank site has a wealth of information about tariffs. It is interesting to explore, but I think we may as well take the “World Bank’s top economists’” word for it that Trump is mostly right, when it comes to tariffs.
