A Tariff On China

The Senate recently backed a bill which would raise tariffs on imported Chinese products as a punishment for China keeping its currency artificially low. The argument behind the bill is that by keeping its currency’s value low China is luring jobs away from America, compounding the current job crisis in the US. Some believe that this tariff could create up to 1.6 million new jobs in the United States.

Still, others fear that the bill, if passed into law, would do more harm than good. Some fear that a trade war with China would ensue, others think that the bill would increase consumer prices, and the president of the US-China Business Council even said that the bill would be “a jobs bill for Vietnam”, believing that companies would simply shift to other counties with low wages, instead of the US.