Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said China may deserve some flexibility regarding pledges of U.S. commodity purchases under phase one of the trade agreement on difficulties dealing with the coronavirus.
“I think we can say that they are taking the proper steps to carry out phase one, but the subtraction from that would be their economy is in trouble,” Grassley told reporters Wednesday. “And the extent to which their economy is in trouble, I think they would have some flexibility.”
Interestingly, Grassley said there are talks in the White House on potentially lifting some remaining tariffs on China to ease the coronavirus pressure. “I think in order for it to do any good it would have to be reciprocal,” he said.
However, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro Wednesday shot down any suggestion of tariffs being lifted.
Calls for the U.S. to either provide tariff exemptions or to suspend tariffs imposed on Chinese goods entering the U.S. are “absurd,” Navarro told Politico. Such calls for tariff reductions are “simply a fake news gambit by the usual Wall Street suspects who never met an American job they did not want to offshore for the sake of a buck,” he said.
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