President Donald Trump was reportedly taken for a ride by a Brazilian beef billionaire in a futile attempt to lower food prices for American consumers.
“Imports have drifted between 10 percent and 15 percent of the overall U.S. beef supply over the past decade, rising with the demand for fast-food burgers,” reported The Wall Street Journal’s Patrick Thomas on Tuesday. “The USDA now estimates imports rising to a record 20 percent of U.S. beef supplies this year.”
Thomas added, “In late August, Brazilian billionaire Joesley Batista, who shares control of JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, met with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss how additional beef from Brazil could lower U.S. beef prices, the Journal reported. To do that, though, Trump would have to drop a 26 percent import tax.”
He continued, “The next day, Trump announced on social media a plan to temporarily allow 300,000 metric tons of beef imports into the U.S., which the president said would be sold at a 25 percent discount to market prices. So far, there is little sign that the imports have lowered prices. The American Farm Bureau Federation, the largest farmer trade group, said Trump’s plan has done little to lower prices across the U.S. so far, except for a few cents at some grocery stores.”
Trump’s willingness to lower tariffs on Brazil in return for a bargain that helps him with a key voter bloc for an election speaks to a deeper concern experts have raised with his protectionist policies. Speaking to AlterNet in September, Dr. Elizabeth McKillen, professor emerita of history at the University of Maine, answered a question comparing tariffs under Trump to former President Grover Cleveland’s 1894 that high tariffs create a “communism of pelf.”
“Tariffs lend themselves to corruption by the president,” McKillen told AlterNet. “And certainly that was true back in Grover Cleveland’s period, when many of the corporations worked with the presidents directly to try to extend their own wealth, and then the president was doing the same thing.So yes, I think it’s true that tariffs lend themselves to Trump’s corruption, certainly, and they have in certain other periods as well.”
According to Dr. Robert J. Shapiro, a top economic adviser to former President Bill Clinton, Trump’s tariffs have become so unpopular that they have fundamentally transformed national conversation on trade policy.
“The party has shifted fundamentally on tariffs, and they’re doing so because of the effects of the tariffs and because the tariffs are a signature Trump policy,” Shapiro told AlterNet earlier this month. “Look, the most direct and easy-to-understand step the Democrats can take to address prices is to repeal all the tariffs in the first week. All the Trump tariffs, just repeal them. You pass a law, let him veto it, and then let’s see whether you can get enough Republicans in the Senate to support it.”