The Trump administration imposed new duties on imports from more than 80 countries on Thursday. They include 50% markups on Canadian imports and 10% to 12.5% tariffs on other major trading partners.
The president and CEO of Associated Industries of Massachusetts, or AIM, Brooke Thomson, said that when these sweeping tariffs come down, the businesses they represent just pause.
“Every time there’s a new announcement about a new tariff, it creates this paralyzation of the economy,” Thomson said. “We don’t know what this is going to do and we’re not going to grow. We’re not going to add. We’re not going to hire.”
President Donald Trump wants to promote domestic manufacturing, but taxes on imports tend to hurt American businesses and consumers.
AIM is a group of business owners in Massachusetts that lobby to promote what they believe to be a vibrant state economy where everyone succeeds.
Of the 3,000 members, Thomson said that these tariffs impact every one of them. She spoke of one business whose contracted work went up $1 million overnight because of the forecasted cost impact from the tariffs.
With Mexico and Canada included in the new tariffs, Thomson is also concerned about the immediate impacts on families.
“These long-standing cooperative relationships start to dissolve a little bit, there’s certainly short-term ramifications for these items going up in price,” Thomson said. “The minute a tariff hits, the businesses are going to pass that on to the consumer, because they’ve got to continue to make their margins.”
Massachusetts and Canada are close trading partners, with a large amount of that trade being lumber and steel for home building, and parts for technology.
It goes beyond the goods, straining the relationships between the countries.
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey released a statement in response to Trump’s announcement, frustrated by the president’s attempt at more taxes.
“Nobody can afford this,” Healey said. “I’m going to keep working every day in Massachusetts to lower the cost of housing, energy and health care, and I’m going to keep standing up to the damage President Trump is doing to our people and our economy.”
U.S. House Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member Richard Neal, a Democrat who represents Springfield, said that this is once again the president doing what he wants, despite having similar tariffs struck down by the Supreme Court just months ago.
“With his global tariffs expiring tonight, Trump is once again flipping through the statute books looking for any authority to keep them in place,” Neal said. “The American people deserve a coherent trade strategy — not another last-minute attempt to save face for a president who has completely lost the plot.”
The next thing that local businesses say they’re doing is waiting for the legal ramifications to shake out. They don’t know if the courts will once again step in, like the Supreme Court did when it struck down Trump’s previous attempts to impose sweeping tariffs by executive order.
