At the start of the week, small businesses that kicked in Tuesday morning on anything imported from Canada and Mexico.
A day later, the Trump administration suspended tariffs for automakers abiding by the. A day after that, the president , at least on items that also meet USMCA. The administration also to 10% on energy products and potash for the agriculture industry even if they aren鈥檛 qualified under USMCA.
Helpful? Not really, said Brian Kuehl, executive director of Farmers for Free Trade, which sponsored a tariff discussion at the World Trade Center Denver this week.
鈥淭he uncertainty is very harmful. It鈥檚 hard for businesses to plan when they don鈥檛 know, day to day, what the tariff rates will be,鈥� Kuehl said Thursday. 鈥淎lso challenging is the fact that many goods that could qualify under USMCA haven鈥檛 had to claim USMCA coverage because they had no tariffs or low tariffs outside of USMCA. I鈥檓 sure shippers of those goods are scrambling to set up compliance processes to ship their goods under USMCA. That in itself is disruptive and an added cost.鈥�
Small businesses statewide scrambled this week to make sense of the impact though with tariff orders changing almost daily, it was difficult to do that. In Colorado, the 25% tariffs for Canada and Mexico plus the newer 20% for Chinese imports would add $1.4 billion to Colorado importers a year, according to by economic research firm Trade Partnership Worldwide. The three countries make up nearly half of Colorado鈥檚 $17 billion import market.
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