Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran said Thursday that he would advise leaders around the world to “take a breath and not retaliate” when it comes to President Donald Trump’s tariffs. Instead, he told Newsmax that foreign leaders might be able to negotiate with the president to lower the tariffs the United States is imposing.
“The president’s been very clear that if other countries retaliate for our fair and reciprocal tariffs, then tariff rates will go up even higher,” Miran said on Newsmax’s “Wake Up America.” “Look, the president is famed for his negotiating skills. The president is famed for his ability to create deals where not only nobody else could, but nobody thought it was possible. And so, it is quite possible that, in the end, foreign leaders end up making offers to the president that he decides are good for America and good for Americans and then tariff rates get negotiated lower.”
On Wednesday, Trump declared a 10% baseline tax on imports from all countries and higher tariff rates on dozens of nations that have trade surpluses with the United States. According to a chart Trump held up while he was speaking at the White House, the U.S. is set to charge a 34% tax on imports from China, a 20% tax on imports from the European Union, 25% on South Korea, 24% on Japan, and 32% on Taiwan.
The president charged that “our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, plundered” by other nations in the post-World War II global trade system.
Miran said that one of the things that affect trade balances are nontariff barriers, as well as “currency policy and other market closures and policies that make markets inaccessible to American exports.”
“These can be things like regulations, like you have to satisfy very particular regulations tailored to the local market or environmental review that really, at the end of the day, make it impossible for American firms to enter a market and to sell into a market,” he said.
“Now, quantifying these things is extraordinarily complex. The president has been focused for many decades on trade deficits and decided, rightfully, that the cumulative trade deficits over the years were an emergency.”
“So the approach that the White House chose to take, that the president chose to take, is to look at the trade deficits we have with every country and think about what’s the tariff rate that would bring those trade deficits into balance, because they clearly haven’t been in balance for decades and that has ravaged our manufacturing sector and hurt our ability to defend ourselves,” Miran added.
The economic council chief said that Trump’s tariffs were chosen “in a way that ranks the countries” and applies “higher tariffs to countries that have cheated America and ripped off America in a worse manner, and lower tariffs to countries that have behaved better.”
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