Business Insider

With so much focus on “unfair” trade vis-à-vis U.S. trade partners, especially China, it’s sometimes sobering to look at protectionist U.S. policies that restrict imported goods and services by slapping them with high tariffs.  The Business Insider provides a good start in its focus on 25 imported products that have the biggest U.S. tariffs. Take a look at the highlighted tariffs that range from 20 percent on some dairy products to 37.5 percent for leather shoes, then 163.8 percent on unshelled peanuts up to a whopping 350 percent for imported tobacco.

But what do these tariffs mean for consumers?  Obviously, they raise their costs.  Ed Gresser of the Progressive Policy Institute has written extensively on how U.S. tariffs are really regressive — they hurt the poor the most by increasing the costs of needed goods, such as shoes and clothes.  Here’s what Gresser says:

Though the tariff system is smaller than other taxes, it is far more regressive. This is because poor people spend a greater share of their income on clothes and shoes than do wealthy or middle-class people. The cheap and simple goods made in poor countries and bought by low-income Americans are subject to far higher tariffs than luxury goods. An acrylic sweater attracts a 32 percent tariff, while a cashmere sweater gets only 4 percent; a polyester bra is tagged with a 17 percent tariff, while one made of silk gets less than three percent; and a cheap stainless steel fork is hit with a 19 percent tariff, while a silver-plated spoon has none at all.

Since the Business Insider feature only looked at tariffs, it missed some of the most egregious protectionist programs in the U.S. — the U.S. sugar program that guarantees sugar producers a certain price by restricting domestic supply as well as sugar imports.  Or take the U.S. cotton program that subsidizes a small number of cotton producers at taxpayer expense and makes it uncompetitive for many poor countries to export their cotton to the U.S.  As with these and other protectionist policies, they generally help a small group of producers by restricting competition, but the costs are borne by consumers in terms of fewer choices and higher prices.