Remember how foolish Democratic leaders and their allies looked when they characterized tax wage increases and bonuses as “crumbs,” after the GOP tax cut?
Today we saw a White House official adopt the exact same messaging strategy for the president’s newly announced tariffs on steel and aluminum.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross appeared on CNBC Friday to dismiss criticisms that the president’s trade war would hurt middle- and working-class consumers.
“This is a can of Campbell’s Soup. In the can of Campbell’s Soup there’s about 2.6 cents, 2.6 pennies worth of steel, so if that goes up by 25 percent, that’s about six-tenths of one cent on the price of Campbell’s Soup,” he said Friday during an interview on CNBC. “Who in the world is going to be too bothered by six-tenths of one cent?”
If you can believe it, Ross actually showed up for his television interview with several props, including a Coca-Cola, a Budweiser tallboy and, yes, a can of Campbell’s soup.
He added, “There’s about one ton of steel in a car. The price of a ton of steel is $700 or so, so 25 percent on that would be one half of one percent increase on the typical $35,000 car. So it’s no big deal.”
Easy for him to say! It may be “no big deal” for a man whose net worth is in the ballpark of $700 million, but I can assure you increases in the cost of foodstuffs will matter a great deal to people in lower income brackets. It’ll certainly matter to many of the same people who put Trump in the White House in the first place.
As Hot Air’s Allahpundit notes: “Another industry that’ll be hit hard by steel and aluminum tariffs is, uh, brewing. Lucky for Trump that his voters don’t much like cars or beer, though, right?”
It was just a few weeks ago that the White House and its allies were hailing the savings and bonuses generated by tax reform. It was just a few weeks ago that the same people were pointing and laughing at Democrats for trying to find the downside to these tax-related benefits. Now, we’re talking about how, actually, a few cents here, $175 there, are basically chump change.
Who pinches pennies anyway, am I right? Honestly. Did Ross accidentally switch his notes with Pelosi?
This messaging disaster is made all the worse by the fact that Ross is an enormously wealthy human being. I mention this not because I begrudge the man his wealth, but because I recognize that his remarks are every bit as boneheaded and tone deaf as what Pelosi, herself a millionaire many times over, said about tax reform.
