Trump’s tariff on aluminum is projected to cost 20,000 Americans their jobs in beer-related industries.
An analysis by the Beer Institute found that Trump’s tariff is going to amount to a $347 million annual tax on beer:
I estimate that the aluminum tariff will increase the annual cost of beer production in the U.S. by $347.7 million per year. To put that in perspective, after decades of persistent effort, last December the U.S. beer industry successfully lobbied Congress to reduce its federal excise taxes by about $130 million per year for the next two years. The aluminum tariff will not only wipeout every cent of beer’s hard-won excise tax relief – it will pile on an additional $217.7 million in costs each year the tariff is kept in place.
The U.S. beer industry creates 2.23 million American jobs, which is 1.4% of all U.S. employment. The aluminum tariff will put more than 20,000 of these jobs at risk. About half of the jobs that would be lost will be from brewers, distributors, and retailers who sell beer to American drinkers. The other half would be from companies that sell inputs to beer production like aluminum cans and from other jobs that exist because of household spending by people who work in beer.
The broader economy will also suffer due to the tariff on beer cans. The beer industry generates more than $350 billion in economic activity throughout the U.S., which is equal to 1.9% of GDP. Beer also generates more than $63.5 billion in annual tax revenue to the federal government and to communities across the country. The proposed aluminum tariff will reduce beer’s economic output by nearly $2.5 billion and reduce the amount of tax revenue paid through the production and sale of beer by more than $550 million (excluding any revenue collected via the tariff itself).
Tens of thousands of jobs could be lost, and billions of dollars in economic output will go down the drain because Donald Trump thinks that tariffs are great. The Trump administration is scrambling to promote trade deals that do not really exist, as they are viewing the tariffs as a political message to be managed, not a threat to the US economy.
The Beer Institute analysis also warned that the negative impacts of the tariff are already being felt as the price of aluminum is going up. The tariffs are not short-term pain. Tariffs build a long-term cumulative negative impact on an economy. The longer the tariffs are in place, the worse the consequences become.
Trump is killing jobs, and the situation will only worsen, the longer he sticks to his plan to try to take the US economy back to the 1950s.
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Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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