WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 — Renowned U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs on Monday urged President Donald Trump to provide relief to American families who bore the costs of the sweeping tariffs his administration imposed, after the Supreme Court ruled that these tariffs were unlawful.
The tariffs were “illegal, unfair, and detrimental to the American people,” and it was not the foreign countries, but the American families, who were paying for the tariffs, Sachs, a professor of economics and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, wrote in an opinion piece published on the U.S.-based news website Common Dreams.
He cited economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and other independent research institutions as saying that the “burden of the tariffs fell overwhelmingly on American importers, businesses, and consumers.”
“The administration has the responsibility to design such relief. You took the money illegally; now you should return it,” Sachs stressed. According to him, roughly 140 billion U.S. dollars in tariff revenue was collected at U.S. ports last year.
In the meantime, American households on average paid roughly 1,000 dollars or more due to the tariffs.
“For families living paycheck to paycheck, that is not abstract.
That is rent stretched to the breaking point. That is groceries rising in price while wages fail to keep up,” Sachs said. On Friday morning, U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 vote that Trump’s tariff policy under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was illegal.
Hours later after the ruling, Trump signed an order imposing a 10 percent tariff on imports from all countries.
On Saturday, Trump said he would raise the new global tariff to 15 percent.
On Monday, Trump threatened countries around the world to abide by any tariff deals they agreed to despite the Supreme Court ruling.
“Any Country that wants to ‘play games’ with the ridiculous supreme court decision, especially those that have ‘Ripped Off’ the U.S.A. for years, and even decades, will be met with a much higher Tariff, and worse, than that which they just recently agreed to,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. (Namibia Daily News/Xinhua)
