The retailer should have stuck with a proposal to display how import taxes affect the prices of its products.
President Donald Trump’s tariff policy triggered a brief, dramatic and instructive retail scandal on Tuesday. Quite aside from the economic case against imposing a tax on imports, which is as strong as it is universal, the incident shows the practical difficulties of tariffs.
After a report that Amazon would display the cost of tariffs on their products, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said doing so would be a “hostile and political action.” Less than an hour later, Amazon issued a statement that though one of its teams discussed “the idea of listing import charges on certain products,” it was “never a consideration for the main Amazon site.” A company spokesman later clarified that the idea “was never approved and is not going to happen.”
That’s too bad. The idea is a good one that is catching on with other retailers. And Amazon itself already lists state sales taxes separately at checkout. So why not include a tariff, which is just another form of taxation?
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
___________________
Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images
