David Jolly on Tariffs: ‘This Is a Tax that the President Is Imposing Upon Consumers’

EXCERPT:

JOLLY: “To your point, trade wars inflict a lot of pain. And the reality is what we are seeing now is a unilateral Trump tax on the consumer. To Ali's point, this is a tax that the president is imposing upon consumers. And when you move in that direction, when you try to adjust global trade policy, what he is hoping for is that there is necessarily wage and economic growth in domestic industries to compensate, to overcome that additional cost to the consumer. But the reality is we are not seeing that. The basket of goods, where the consumer sees the increase in prices, they are not seeing increase in wages that match that. They don’t have the discretionary income each month, going up at a rate that's greater than what it is going to cost them to provide for the household. That's where the pain is.”