President Donald Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum is prompting opposition from representatives of equipment manufacturers who say they’ll be burdened with higher input costs than their foreign competitors will pay.
Also reacting with concern are GOP lawmakers who blasted the plan and investors on Wall Street, where stocks tumbled.
Trump says the tariffs would be 25 percent for steel and 10 percent for aluminum. “And it will be for a long period of time,” he says in comments released March 1 by the White House.
“People have no idea how badly our country has been treated by other countries, by people representing us that didn’t have a clue,” the president had said this week during a listening session with representatives from the steel and aluminum industries.
“Or if they did, then they should be ashamed of themselves because they’ve destroyed the steel industry, they’ve destroyed the aluminum industry, and other industries, frankly, when you look at all the plants, the car plants, automobile plants that moved down to Mexico for no reason whatsoever, except we didn’t know what we were doing.”
