President Donald Trump’s trade and tariff policies in recent months are essentially a tax on American citizens, according to Ross Gerber, the CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management.
Tariffs Have Raised Taxes
On Thursday, in a post on X, Gerber said that the “tariffs have raised taxes on Americans,” referring to them as a consumption-based tax, contrary to their intended use as a trade policy tool for reshoring manufacturing, as they have been promoted.
Gerber also highlights their regressive nature, given the disproportionate impact they stand to have on households with lower disposable incomes. He says, the tariffs move “the cost of taxes from the rich to the rest of America.”
The investor pointed out that while tariffs are imposed uniformly across goods and consumers, their impact is anything but fair, since they take up a significantly larger share of income at poorer households than at the wealthier ones.
Tariff A ‘Value-Added Tax’
Several other prominent experts have echoed similar views in recent weeks, with investor Kevin O’Leary calling it a value-added tax on American consumers.
“There’s no American VAT tax. However, what Trump has done is exactly that, and he’s called it something else,” he said, adding that “The Europeans and the Canadians call theirs VAT. Who cares what it’s called? It’s a tax.”
Last week, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) announced plans for a bipartisan legislation targeting Trump’s 15% to 20% tax on coffee. Khanna notes that America produces “less than 1%” of the coffee that it consumes, making it a significant financial burden for consumers.
Khanna calls these tariffs a tax, saying that “Anyone who has a coffee cup always in hand hates this tax!” adding that this was essentially a “tax on Americans at the start of their day,” which has to go.
Fund manager Peter Boockvar, the CIO at Bleakley Financial Group, highlights the impact this is set to have on businesses. He says, “If we’re left with a 15% tariff baseline on $3.3 trillion worth of imports, that’s about $500 billion in new taxes,” adding that it essentially undoes Trump’s tax cuts from 2017.
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