Polyester Shirts to $3 Shoes Face Highest U.S. Tariffs
Polyester Shirts to $3 Shoes Face Top U.S. Duties
Marc Serota/Getty Images
Sneakers costing less than $3 a pair, are no longer made in the U.S. so the protection isn’t saving any jobs.
Sneakers costing less than $3 a pair, are no longer made in the U.S. so the protection isn’t saving any jobs. Photographer: Marc Serota/Getty Images
Low-cost imports of items such as $3 sneakers, polyester shirts and drinking glasses face the steepest U.S. tariffs, punishing poor consumers without benefiting American manufacturers, according to a study.
“We need to bring pro-shopper populism into trade debates,” Edward Gresser, director of the ProgressiveEconomy project in Washington and a former Clinton administration trade official, said today at an event in Washington to release his study. “This is easily the most regressive of taxes.”
Many of the goods are no longer made in the U.S. so the protection isn’t saving jobs, he said. Most of the sneakers come from China. Overall employment in the four highest-protected industries -- clothes, footwear, luggage and linens -- fell to 240,000 last year from 1.8 million in 1970, the study said.
Gresser combed through the U.S. tariff schedule to find the products with the highest import duties. Home goods face tariffs 20 times the average U.S. duty, raising $14 billion a year in revenue for the U.S. Treasury. That accounts for two-thirds of all the tariff revenue, he said.
The findings were released at an event where Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee’s subcommittee on trade, said they show the need to rework the tariff code. Two bills in Congress would lift some tariffs for goods not made in the U.S., one for footwear and the other for hiking shoes and other outdoor wear.
“It’s inefficient and wrong that so many goods are saddled with high tariffs,” Wyden said. “We need to get the interests of consumers and taxpayers taken care of.”
High Rates ‘Concealed’
Overall, U.S. tariffs average 1.7 percent if various free- trade agreements and preference programs are exempted.
“The low average conceals some very high rates on particular products, preserved intact throughout nine postwar trade agreements,” Gresser wrote. Most of those high tariffs cover home goods such as towels, luggage, cheap shoes, linens and clothes, he said.
In all, the U.S. raises $9.5 billion on $65 billion a year on clothing imports, and $2 billion on $20 billion in footwear imports, according to U.S. International Trade Commission data analyzed by Gresser.
Goods such as cashmere sweaters, snakeskin purses and silk shirts face low or no import duties.
“In practice, the tariff system is not only a way to tax home goods but to focus that tax on the goods shoppers buy at Main Street retailers, Wal-Marts and Payless shoe stores,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Drajem in Washington at mdrajem@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Liebert at lliebert@bloomberg.net
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