Alabama exports to China may almost double in price soon. The communist nation is vowing to impose an eighty four percent tax on U.S. imports in retaliation to Donald Trump’s fifty percent tariff. The U.S. China Business Council says Alabama exported four billion dollars in products to China last year. The economic pain may not end there. Published reports in China say that nation may tax services as well. The Council says Alabama exports four million dollars in services to China like education and royalties.
President Donald Trump is pausing his latest round of tariffs by ninety days, except for China where he raised the tax rate on Chinese imports to 125%. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters that the pause was not a result of the brutal selloffs in the financial markets but rather because other countries are seeking negotiations. About an hour later, Trump told reporters that he pulled back on many tariffs because people were getting "yippy" and "afraid." Trump told reporters at the White House that he "can't imagine" he would need to increase tariffs on China again to get them to the negotiating table.
"We calculated it very carefully," the president said.
Despite President Donald Trump's 90-day pause limiting tariffs, imports from Mexico and Canada will still get taxed by as much as 25%. That's according to a White House backgrounder. Unlike the tariffs that Trump temporarily took down to 10% to give time for negotiations, the taxes on the United States' two largest trading partners are a separate matter. Mexico and Canada are being tariffed ostensibly to stop fentanyl smuggling and illegal immigration. The backgrounder contradicted an earlier statement by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who said Mexico and Canada would also be tariffed at 10%.
Trump defended his decision to launch the tariffs, sending shocks into the market, because the situation with the U.S.'s trading partners "wasn't sustainable."
"Somebody had to pull the trigger. I was willing to pull the trigger," he said.
The President said he would consider exempting some companies hit particularly hard by the tariffs, but when asked how he would make those determinations, he said, "Just instinctively."
Senate Democratic Leader calls Trump's tariff strategy 'chaos.'
"He keeps changing things from day to day. His advisors are fighting among themselves, calling each other names, and you cannot run a country with such chaos," said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer at a news conference that had originally been scheduled to call attention to the stock market plunge. Schumer added that the danger from Trump's tariffs had not passed and attributed his backing down to the reaction from across the country.
"Donald Trump is feeling the heat from Democrats and across America about how bad these tariffs are," Schumer said. "He is reeling, he is retreating, and that is a good thing."
About 7 in 10 voters believed that Trump imposing tariffs on dozens of countries was going to hurt the U.S. economy in the short-term, according to a Quinnipiac Poll conducted before the president announced a 90-day pause on most of those tariffs.
But there was less consensus that the long-term impact would be negative.
About half of voters believed the tariffs would hurt the U.S. economy in the long term.
Republican voters were about evenly divided on whether the tariffs would help or hurt the U.S. economy in the short term: 46% said they would help, and 44% said they would cause short-term pain. Almost all Democrats and about three-quarters of independents believed the tariffs would harm the economy in the short term.
