Recently President Donald Trump has put out tariffs in an attempt to promote the purchasing of American made goods. A tariff is a tax that a foreign country has to pay to import their goods into the U.S. The positive in this is to promote the purchase of American goods because it should make them cheaper than the competition. The money also goes straight to Congress which could help pay off the country’s debt. Some of these will not work easily though. American manufacturers like car manufacturers put the cars together in the U.S. but still have the tariffs for the parts that are mostly made abroad.

There is also not enough of many products that are made in the U.S. to supply the whole country. The disadvantages of this tariff situation is that the countries aren’t the ones that have to find the money to pay the tariffs. These other countries will just raise the price of the product making it so that Americans are the ones that have to pay that extra similar to a tax. These tariffs have also been put on ally countries and countries that we have a free trade agreement with which has significantly weakened our relationship with these countries which may risk our membership in NATO.

This tariff has also started a trade war with other countries. Now there are tariffs that are going out to the U.S. from other countries as well. Our tariffs that we have on other countries include a 67% tariff on China, 39% on the European Union, a 90% tariff on Vietnam, and 46% tariff on Japan. Each of these countries have now set tariffs on the U.S. which has caused mass devastation thus far for the global stock market. Many stocks are dropping significantly including S&P 500 dropping 3.84%, DOW 3.32% drop, and NASDAQ dropping substantial 3.71%.