New Video: Senator Warren Sounds Alarm on Trump Tariffs Devastating Impact on American Families
“If this sounds to you like chaos that’s because it is.”
“(T)hat’s what the Trump presidency is all about – works great for billionaires, and works bad for everyone else.”
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs (BHUA) Committee, released a new video sounding the alarm that President Trump’s tariff scheme is economic chaos that will ultimately mean higher costs for working families.
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced massive new tariffs on nearly every imported product, without a clear plan to protect American workers or prevent corporations from price gouging consumers. His erratic approach has created uncertainty for businesses, rattled financial markets, and is giving corporations an excuse to jack up prices for families on everything from shoes to kitchen appliances.
In her video, Senator Warren breaks down how tariffs work, why strategic tariffs can be a useful tool to support American jobs and manufacturing, and why Trump’s chaotic, across-the-board approach is reckless and dangerous.
Watch the video here and see full transcript below:
Trump just announced a set of massive tariffs.
Now before we get into the details, let’s just take a step back, and talk for a sec about what tariffs are.
Take shoes. Maybe you’re paying about 50 bucks for the pair that you have. Where does that $50 price come from? Well it’s the cost of making the shoes overseas, the cost of shipping them from overseas, and then some extra on top that the company takes home in profits.
And here’s where tariffs come in. They’re a tax on companies when they bring something from overseas to sell to use.
Now, there are a lot of good reasons to use tariffs – to help American manufacturers, to boost good jobs at home – so that not everything we buy comes from China or Mexico. Or maybe because one of those countries is hurting our workers and our businesses, and tariffs push them back.
But that’s not what Donald Trump is doing.
His new tariffs are “across the board” meaning they apply to pretty much every country and every product that those countries sell in the United States – and that is a lot of tariffs.
In some cases it’s 10% extra charge, in other cases 54%. Donald Trump pretty much just made up those numbers, and here’s the scary part. He can change those numbers at any time. In fact, some of his CEO buddies are already lining up to pass along costs to American families - or to ask Trump for special exemptions for themselves.
If this sounds to you like chaos that’s because it is.
And if you’ve turned on the news today, you can see just how badly it’s going for our economy.
What Trump is doing means that businesses will seize up and pull back on their investments. Americans' confidence in our economy will drop even lower, and companies are already talking about using this chaos as cover to raise their own prices even more. So they protect their profits, but your costs go up.
And now your next pair of shoes may not cost fifty bucks. It may cost a hundred.
So why make you pay more for shoes or washer machines or anything else you buy? Well, it turns out that Trump wants to use any money that he collects from all these tariffs to help pay for tax handouts to rich people and giant corporations.
Yup. You pay more. Billionaires pay less. That’s just not right.
But that’s what the Trump presidency is all about – works great for billionaires, and works bad for everyone else.
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