Despite the warnings of economists, a new poll shows most voters support former President Donald Trump‘s plan to place an additional 10% tariff on imports.
Polling conducted by J.L. Partners and the DailyMail reveals that almost a quarter of voters “strongly support” the tariffs, and another 30% also support the fee. Only 16% of voters do not agree with Trump’s protectionist policy, as the tax will be absorbed by U.S. businesses and families and lead to inflation.
“Voters are not in the detail of the economics,” James Johnson, co-founder of J.L. Partners, told the DailyMail. “To them, it is instinctive: protecting America and putting up tariffs if other nations do not play fair is a popular proposition.”
Trump proposed a 10% tariff last year and expressed his enthusiasm for the policy last month.
“I fully believe in them economically when you’re being taken advantage of by other countries,” Trump told Squawk Box.
Trump said the policy would take aim at China. However, while the communist country is the United States’s largest supplier of imports, the country only supplies 16.5% of goods imported.
The across-the-board 10% tariff would also affect trade relations with Mexico, Canada, Japan, and Germany.
An analysis by the Tax Foundation found that the policy would raise taxes on Americans by more than $300 billion a year, and it would also trigger countries to put a retaliatory tax on U.S. exports.
“Americans would see higher prices for a variety of goods that are imported across the border, whether that’s consumer goods or whether it’s a business trying to purchase intermediate inputs that are used to produce its final products,” Erica York, senior economist at the Tax Foundation, told the DailyMail.
The foundation found that the tariff would eliminate more than half a million jobs and reduce the economy by 0.7%. An analysis found that, including retaliatory tariffs, the economy would shrink by 1.1% and more than 825,000 jobs would be threatened.
“Oftentimes when we see Trump talking about this proposal, he’s saying he is going to be taxing foreign businesses,” York said. “It sounds like if you’re taxing foreign business, you get less foreign business, you get more domestic, but that’s not at all how tariffs function. They’re taxes paid by the business in the U.S. importing the goods.”
While in office, Trump imposed a 25% tariff on steel and a 10% tariff on aluminum.
Studies found the tariff raised manufacturers’ input costs, making it more difficult to do business in the U.S.
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In total, tariffs during the Trump administration equaled an $80 billion increase on $380 billion worth of imports.
The Biden administration has kept most of those tariffs in place.