MORE U.S. experts have been urging the Biden administration to scrap Trump-era additional tariffs on Chinese imports, underlining huge benefits for America to end the trade war.

“It’s time to start thinking forward rather than try to fix something that was broken from the start,” said agro-economist Anton Bekkerman, director of the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station and associate dean at the University of New Hampshire’s College of Life Sciences and Agriculture.

“The [additional] tariffs were not smart policies to begin with,” he said.

“The trade war approach can only be described as yet another of several major economic follies pursued by the Trump administration because of woeful and inexcusable ignorance about how the real world works on the part of the then president and some of his key advisors,” said Vincent Smith, agro-economist professor at the University of Montana.

Earlier this year, data released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture showed that Trump’s trade war cost the U.S. agriculture sector about US$27 billion in losses over two years.

David Richardson, an attorney and policy advisor on Capitol Hill in the 1980s, said that the Biden administration “missed” the “opportunity to reverse Trump’s delusional course.”

“[Former U.S. President Donald] Trump often called his tariffs a tax on China. In fact, they are a tax on American consumers, because either the imported good’s price increases to cover the cost of the tariff, or locally-produced goods can be sold at a higher price because of less price competition from imports,” said Stewart King, a history professor who worked as a U.S. State Department official in Africa and the Caribbean in the 1980s and 1990s.

King said that the Biden administration “is moving too slowly to reverse course...The trade war is a case in point.”

Some senior officials of the Biden administration even support the additional tariffs, calling them “an effective tool” despite the outcry from economists to remove them.

America’s conservative media are also backing a continuation of the trade war, seeing it as driving a wedge between the Biden administration and the labor movement.

Economists like Bekkerman said that the link between the additional tariffs and soaring U.S. inflation is obvious, saying “too many dollars chasing too few goods” is “the classic core of inflationary pressure.”

(Xinhua)