On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) stated that while she has supported “targeted tariffs”, the Trump tariffs are increasing costs for businesses and consumers and argued for an increase in some corporate taxes.
Co-host Willie Geist said, “Senator, I’m curious, as we talk about tariffs, sometimes this can feel like a macroeconomic conversation and debate, talking about the markets and Wall Street and everything else. But if you can, take us inside your state of Minnesota and how these tariffs may already have impacted or might, down the road, shortly, impact a business owner, let’s say, or the consumers in Minnesota.”
Klobuchar responded, “Big time. I was with small business owners just this weekend. Someone at a brewery — why not visit a brewery when you have many small businesses — and you look at the cost of aluminum, now, I have favored targeted tariffs. I understand that they can be very helpful in certain circumstances and have favored some of them in the past, under both Democratic and Republican presidents. But that’s not what this is. This is across the board. And for small businesses that have limited money to invest, they have to now decide, even with this pause, which is still 10%, do they buy a bunch of inventory and store it because they don’t know what he’s going to do next because of all the uncertainty, or do they invest in expansion? For big businesses, they may be able to weather this for a while, but for small ones, it’s — they, literally, often, will have their house on the line that they have mortgaged to be able to do this business. So, small businesses, farmers who expect to be able to get their fertilizer, farmers who are completely connected to the rest of the world, this is devastating, because they operate on really small margins and already have the headwinds of avian flu and all kinds of input costs. So, this is very difficult for people. But the ones I’m most worried about are the consumers and the families that are looking at $1,000 a year of this Trump tariff tax.”
Later, she added that we should be “actually increasing some of the corporate taxes so we can bring more funds in to do something about the debt.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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