Jeff Bezos-Owned WaPo Joins Chinese Communist Party in Lobbying Joe Biden to Cut U.S. Tariffs on China

The Washington Post, owned by Amazon Executive Chairman billionaire Jeff Bezos, is joining the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in lobbying President Joe Biden to cut United States tariffs on China-made products.

As Breitbart News has chronicled, Biden and Treasury Department Secretary Janet Yellen have been aiming to cut Section 301 tariffs on billions of dollars worth of China-made products. The tariffs have long been applauded by labor unions for helping boost U.S. wages and American manufacturing.

The Post Editorial Board is siding with Yellen, as well as the CCP, suggesting that U.S. tariffs on China have raised prices for American consumers — a claim that has been debunked by research. The Post also suggests that cutting the tariffs would lower inflation even as economists have found that doing so would equate to a one-time Consumer Price Index (CPI) reduction of 0.3 percent.

“One of the many messes former president Donald Trump left behind are sweeping tariffs on thousands of Chinese products,” the Post Editorial Board writes:

Mr. Trump’s trade war has been a flop, escalating costs for Americans and generating little but ire from China. It’s past time for President Biden to end this. He should not wait months for a formal review of the tariffs. [Emphasis added]

The No. 1 problem facing the U.S. economy is inflation. Mr. Biden is fond of telling Americans that he’s doing everything he can to help, calling it his “top domestic priority.” He deserves credit for releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to get relief at the pump, though sadly prices are once again setting record highs. But it’s surprising that Mr. Biden has not pulled the other major lever he has to try to help reduce inflation: removing — or at least reducing — Mr. Trump’s tariffs on more than $300 billion of imports from China. Mr. Biden himself described the tariffs as “reckless,” yet they remain. [Emphasis added]

Despite the Post‘s claims, analysis by Breitbart News has shown that tariffs do not raise prices on Americans. The latest research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) notes that there is no connection between U.S. tariffs, which were imposed by former President Trump, and current inflation.

“The timing of the tariffs clearly shows no correlation with inflation and eliminating tariffs could not plausibly restrain it,” EPI researchers write. “The bulk of the tariffs were in place before 2020, yet inflation only began accelerating in March 2021. Clearly, inflation was driven by many sources besides tariffs.”

In lobbying to cut U.S. tariffs, the Post joins high-ranking CCP officials who have been urging Biden for months to eliminate the tariffs first imposed by Trump.

“It is time for the U.S. government to … remove the tariffs as soon as possible,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian told the South China Morning Post.

Bezos has a vested interest in cutting U.S. tariffs on foreign imports as his multinational online retail corporation Amazon depends heavily on cheaply-made products made by foreign workers paid pennies on the U.S. dollar.

Research from the Tech Transparency Project, as Breitbart News recently reported, revealed that Amazon has continued working with a number of Chinese corporations accused of using slave labor, specifically forced Uyghur Muslim labor.

U.S. free trade with China has had a devastating impact on America’s working and middle class communities across all 50 states.

From 2001 to 2018, U.S. free trade with China eliminated 3.7 million American jobs from the economy — 2.8 million of which were lost in American manufacturing. During that same period, at least 50,000 American manufacturing plants closed down.

Those massive job losses have coincided with a booming U.S.-China trade deficit. In 1985, before China entered the WTO, the U.S. trade deficit with China totaled $6 billion. In 2019, the U.S. trade deficit with China totaled more than $345 billion.

Meanwhile, a study from 2019 found that permanent U.S. tariffs of 25 percent on all Chinese imports would create more than a million American jobs in five years. American manufacturing is vital to the U.S. economy, as every manufacturing job supports an additional 7.4 American jobs in other industries.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.