What we have here is a failure to communicate, truthfully. The president would have you believe that the tariffs that he is imposing on our most important trading partners is going to open markets and bring back our heavy manufacturing industries by making the Chinese, Canadians, Mexicans and others pay extra to export goods to the U.S. In fact, these tariffs are passed on to the American consumer. We ultimately pay the whole cost of the president’s trade war. Yes, American workers are having jobs stolen from them due to the huge imbalance of trade and yes, we should take immediate corrective action. But, let us take an effective action that would result in actually balancing trade without costing you and me our hard-earned dollars.
Very simply, we should issue a voucher for every dollar’s worth of goods that, say, Costa Rica buys from us, would give them the right to sell us a dollar’s worth of goods back to us or they could sell that voucher to China for them to sell us their goods to us. This would open markets, smooth the imbalance and end the hidden tax on American consumers that is surreptitiously being used to hide the deficit caused by the tax cut for the rich.
— Harry T. Crawford, Jr.
Anchorage
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