President Donald Trump continues his feud with Mexico after Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto called off his upcoming Washington trip due to Trump’s newly announced executive order authorizing the construction of a southern border wall. While Trump now admits that the U.S. would pay the initial costs of the wall, he still insists that Mexico will ultimately reimburse America for the cost of the multi-billion dollar structure.
On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer dropped a diplomatic bombshell when he told reporters that Trump planned to pay for the wall by imposing a 20 percent tax on all Mexican imports.
“If you tax that $50 billion at 20 percent of imports–which is by the way a practice that 160 other countries do–right now our country’s policy is to tax exports and let imports flow freely in, which is ridiculous,” Spicer told reporters, according to the pool report. “By doing that we can do $10 billion a year and easily pay for the wall just through that mechanism alone. That’s really going to provide the funding.”
Spicer noted that the administration had been in touch with congressional leadership regarding the plan, which he said “respected” taxpayers.
“This is something that we’ve been in close contact with both houses in moving forward and creating a plan,” he said, as quoted in the pool report. “It clearly provides the funding and does so in a way that the American taxpayer is wholly respected.”
When asked about the ramifications of Trump’s border tax on Americans who buy Mexican-made goods, Spicer declined to comment.
“I’m not going to get into it,” he said, according to CNN.
Robert Reich, the former labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, was informed of Trump’s latest policy during an MSNBC broadcast.
“It very easily could start a trade war, it’s stupid,” he said in reaction.
Reich’s correct it is stupid and it most certainly will cause a trade war. Trump’s action also raises the possibility that he’s willing to start trade wars with economic allies and rivals should they not agree to his outrageous terms.
Let’s be clear. Trump will not bring back U.S. manufacturing jobs by strong arming other sovereign nations to “re-negotiate” established trade pacts with the U.S. But he is likely to drive up the prices of goods from those countries causing economic hardship for most Americans, some of whom put him into office.
Trump’s like an idiot trying to light a cigarette in a dynamite factory, we’re just all waiting for the boom.
Featured image via Spencer Platt/Getty Images
