DONALD Trump has imposed fresh tariffs on more than 80 countries, replacing a blanket 10 per cent duty hours before it lapsed.
The new levies of 10 or 12.5 per cent took effect on Friday morning and cover the UK, Canada, Mexico, China, India, Australia and the 27 EU member states.
The US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, announced them under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a provision aimed at countries permitting forced labour and used only sparingly before Trump’s presidency.
Countries that have undertaken to ban goods made with forced labour, among them Canada, the EU, India, Mexico and the UK, pay the lower rate.
Australia, Brazil, China and Japan pay 12.5 per cent.
‘The United States has had a forced labour import ban for nearly a century, and rigorously enforces it; it’s well past time for our trading partners to do the same,’ Greer said.
The Thirteenth Amendment to the US constitution bars slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for crime, an exception under which around 800,000 people in American prisons work, most for between 13 and 52 cents an hour and, in seven states, for nothing at all, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
He had signed the previous tariff order within hours of the supreme court ruling 6-3 that his ‘liberation day’ tariffs, imposed under a 1977 emergency powers law, were unlawful.
Taxation in peacetime belongs to Congress alone. ‘The Framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the executive branch,’ the majority opinion said.
Australia and Brazil called the tariffs unjustified. Norway’s foreign minister said there was no basis for them.
The EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said the bloc had honoured its commitments under last year’s transatlantic agreement and viewed the announcement as a shock.
Canada said it ‘should not be targeted’.
Alan Wolff, a former deputy director-general of the World Trade Organisation, now at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote on Thursday: ‘Congress did not delegate authority of such breadth to the president. It cannot constitutionally do so.
‘These new tariffs would represent another case of presidential overreach. If they were challenged in court, the supreme court would likely overturn them.’
Trump calls tariff ‘the most beautiful word in the dictionary’.
The New York Federal Reserve estimates that 90 per cent of their cost has been passed to American consumers and businesses.
Polling by Harris found seven in ten Americans saying they had paid more because of the duties, including 64 per cent of Republican voters, with November’s midterms approaching. Since February the government has repaid companies tens of billions in tariff revenue.
