Days after Donald Trump unveiled his revised list of tariffs on more than a dozen countries, the US President on Monday defended his move and said the United States should have done the same years ago.
He also said he was not looking for leverage, but for fairness.
Speaking to reporters, Trump also said that with the tariffs imposed, the United States will have a lot of money coming in.
Trump also said some Americans could get some kind of dividend or distribution of money as a result of tariffs being imposed on US trading partners.
“We’re going to pay down debt. We have a lot of money coming in, much more money than the country’s ever seen, by hundreds of billions of dollars,” Donald Trump told reporters.
“There could be a distribution or a dividend to the people of our country, I would say for people that would be middle-income people and lower-income people, we could do a dividend, but one of the things we’re gonna be doing is reducing debt,” the US President said.
“But we have hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our country now, we should’ve done this many years ago.”
“And I did it in my first term with China, we didn’t get to the rest because Covid hit. But China was paying us hundreds of millions of dollars in tariffs, and we did it then. Then [Joe] Biden screwed it all,” he added.
“I’m not looking for leverage, I’m looking for fairness,” Trump said.
“We want to see reciprocal wherever we can, and all I can say is this, our country will be taking in hundreds of billions of dollars,” the US President added.
Barely six months after he returned to the White House, Trump retreated temporarily after his Liberation Day announcement triggered a rout in financial markets and suspended the reciprocal tariffs for 90 days to give countries a chance to negotiate.
The US slapped a 25 per cent tariff on India, potentially impacting about half of the USD 86 billion Indian exports to America, while the other half, including pharmaceuticals, electronics, and petroleum products, continued to be exempted from the levy.
New Delhi continues to be engaged in talks with the US to work out a trade deal, but will make no compromise on agricultural, daily and genetically modified (GM) products, news agency PTI quoted sources as saying.
For the sixth round of talks, the US team is coming to India on August 25, it added.
The United Kingdom agreed to 10 per cent tariffs on its exports to the United States, up from 1.3 per cent before Trump amped up his trade war with the world.
The European Union and Japan accepted US tariffs of 15 per cent. Those are much higher than the low single-digit rates they paid last year, but lower than the tariffs he was threatening (30 per cent on the EU and 25 per cent on Japan).
Also, cutting deals with Trump and agreeing to hefty tariffs were Pakistan, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Even countries that saw their tariffs lowered from April without reaching a deal are still paying much higher tariffs than before Trump took office.
Angola’s tariff, for instance, dropped to 15 per cent from 32 per cent in April, but in 2022 it was less than 1.5 per cent.
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