No matter how much they despise each other, that they exchange insults of salt, that they accuse each other of being the worst, one a depraved socialist and the other a fascist dictator, there is a line of continuity between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That connection is called China, the factor most feared by power and citizens in the United States.
Maintaining the taxes established by Trump, President Biden will announce today a batch of tough new tariffs against $18 billion worth of Chinese imports. The White House argues that this increase is necessary to protect American industry from unfair competition. The Government justifies this measure due to “unacceptable risks to the economic security” of the United States.
Starting this year, the Washington administration will quadruple tariffs on electric vehicles, from 25% to 100%. Solar cells will rise from 25% to 50%, while some tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will increase from the current 7.5% to 25%.
Biden has also directed US Trade Representative Katherine Tal to triple taxes on lithium-ion batteries for electric cars and lithium batteries used for other uses. By 2025, tariffs on imports of semiconductors from China will jump from 25% to 50%.
The decision, in the face of Beijing’s unstoppable stalking, represents a broader range than ever, since for the first time taxes will be imposed on medical needles and syringes, as well as ship-to-shore cranes. This tariff increase will also affect rubber medical gloves, some respirators and masks.
Other items, such as batteries and natural graphite, will have longer tax phase-in periods. According to the White House, this is due to the need to give the US manufacturing sector a longer period of time to stock up on enough domestically produced batteries to meet consumer demand.
“China is producing at a pace and with a trajectory that far exceeds any plausible estimate of global demand,” an administration official explained in a telephone press conference. “That will flood the global market with supplies that undermine our ability to develop productive capacity, leaving everyone in the world more vulnerable to that economic coercion,” he insisted.
From the Government, and from different agencies, concern has grown in recent weeks about the internal subsidies that China is offering to the development of clean energy. They consider that Beijing is illegitimately helping with these subsidies to cause an overproduction of clean energy products such as solar panels and electric cars that go far beyond domestic demand.
If these companies cannot sell this excess production internally, US sources indicated that this could end up in global markets, making it very difficult for the nascent green energy industry to be competitive in other countries.
“China’s overcapacity distorts global prices and patterns, causing harm to businesses and workers in the United States, and around the world,” said Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on a recent visit to that country. . The Chinese authorities denied it.
This announcement of tariff increases occurs in the so-called “infrastructure week”, when the president himself and other members of his cabinet are traveling around the US to praise massive investments in this area.
Many of these investments are still in development and implementation scenarios. The imposition of new tariffs seeks to prevent an avalanche of cheap Chinese products, often of dubious quality, due to the imminent progress of the United States in terms of clean energy.