Forbes magazine owner Steve Forbes warns that trade tariffs are really just sales taxes in disguise and both consumers and business will be better off once they are removed.
“Tariff is another word for sales tax,” Forbes told "The Cats Roundtable" on 970 AM-N.Y.
"The quicker we get rid of these (tariffs), the better off consumers will be, the better off businesses will be," Forbes told host John Catsimatidis. "When you hear 25 percent tariff on autos, that’s the equivalent to a 25 percent sales tax on automobiles," the chairman and editor-in-chief of Forbes Media explained.
Forbes also wasn't hopeful of a trade deal with China being reached, indicating that there's still much to do."We're not going to get an agreement before November," he said. "That's going to be a tougher one," while trade pacts with other global rivals will more easily be forged, he said.
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He said while "very serious trade abuses that have been committed," he thinks there is a better way to bring the guilty parties to justice.
He suggested the U.S. "take more of a laser-like approach, focus on specific individual companies, specific industries, specific individuals in China and we put sanctions on them for violating agreements, for doing things they shouldn’t be doing."
Forbes said such a precision strike "should get immediate attention from Beijing and perhaps we can then wrap something up with them in the next few months."
The "key thing is stopping abuses. Trade done right is a good thing, we all benefit from it," said Forbes, a Republican candidate in the 1996 and 2000 presidential primaries.
"When we remove barriers, America does very well, we’re very competitive," he said.
Forbes said otherwise, "the American economy is booming" because of all of Trump's accomplishments.
"Deregultion has worked, the tax cuts have worked. New-business formations are booming for the first time in a generation. People are starting bussines in a way we haven’t seen in 15, 20 years," he said.
"Whoever thought a few years ago one of the big problems would be labor shortages. We don’t have enough workers. Jobs are going begging," he explained.
"We’re prosperous again. It’s a nice problem to have."
Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan economists said on Friday that if the United States soon ends up imposing tariffs on all Chinese imports, the nation’s economic growth would be reduced by up to 0.2 percentage point by the end of 2019, while domestic core inflation would rise by 0.2-0.3 point. The tariffs would trim the government’s budget gap to $900 billion from $1 trillion in fiscal 2019, they said in a research note.
The economic impact from duties on an estimated $544 billion worth of Chinese-made products could be greater “if business confidence suffers more than we expect,” they wrote, Reuters reported.
The Trump administration said it would implement tariffs on an additional $200 billion of Chinese imports on Sept. 24, starting at a 10 percent rate that would grow to 25 percent in 2019.
Beijing retaliated with a plan to impose tariffs on $60 billion worth of U.S.-made goods.
J.P. Morgan economists forecast U.S. consumers would pay $40 billion more on imports, which is equivalent to 0.2 percentage point of $20 trillion in gross domestic product.
They said the Federal Reserve will likely assess the effects from tariffs as transitory. If a bump-up in inflation were to materialize, Fed officials may raise their median forecast on the number of interest rate hikes in 2019 to four from their current average of three.
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