Amazon's idea about tariffs was right: they are taxes and consumers should know it, writes the Wall Street Journal
ANSA photo
in quotation marks
A disclaimer on the e-commerce site could have shown the impact of the restrictive measures wanted by Trump on its products. After a phone call with the American president everything remained as before, but buyers are already feeling the weight of the additional costs. Whether the retailers make them explicit or not
On the same topic:
Yesterday, the site Punchbowl published a scoop saying that Amazon would show American shoppers on the site the percentage of the total price of their cart due to the tariffs introduced by Donald Trump . For example, if a vacuum cleaner costs $140, a disclaimer could read: “Cost of tariff: $55.” The goal was clear: Amazon wants to inform its customers that the price increase depends on the American government , not on it. Amazon owner Jeff Bezos immediately made it clear that the plan had not been officially approved, it was just a hypothesis.
But the White House responded immediately, with its usual brutality: “This is a hostile and political act by Amazon,” said spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt , saying the company was in fact replicating Chinese propaganda. Shortly afterward, there was a remedial phone call between Bezos and President Trump: everything was resolved “quickly.” But, asks the Wall Street Journal, a conservative newspaper highly critical of the administration’s policy on tariffs, if “Trump claims his tariffs could generate enough revenue to replace the income tax, why is he afraid to show Americans how much they are paying? ” According to the WSJ, “the public could have benefited from the price transparency proposed by Amazon. Tariffs are taxes, and knowing how political choices affect final prices is useful . Some consumers may even think that the additional cost is worth supporting Trump’s policy. But it is undeniable that they are paying, and everyone would benefit from knowing how much.”
Trump likes to say, the newspaper continues in its editorial, "that it is foreign exporters who bear the full cost of tariffs, with no impact on customers. But economists disagree." Leavitt said: why then didn't you also show the impact of inflation on product prices during the Biden administration? The WSJ responds: "This comparison ignores the peculiar simplicity of tariffs, which, just like taxes, add a precise amount to the price of a product." The conservative newspaper concludes by saying that consumers already feel the weight of tariffs, whether retailers explicitly state them or not, "the White House's denials will not change this reality, but the elimination of tariffs will."
More on these topics:
ilmanifesto
