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Floor Speech

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Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I am happy to be on the floor this afternoon with my colleague from New England, Senator Welch from Vermont. We are neighboring States that have been spooning for a very long time. But we are here today to talk about a very serious issue, and that is the tariffs that President Trump is talking about imposing on goods from Canada and Mexico and the impact that will have on Americans.

On Saturday, President Trump announced a 25-percent tariff, which would be a tax on imported goods from Canada and Mexico; and a 10- percent tariff, which would amount to a tax on imported energy from Canada and on all goods for China--so 10 percent on all goods for China and 10 percent on energy for Canada.

He has also threatened universal tariffs on all countries. Thankfully, the tariffs that he announced on Canada and Mexico appear to have been delayed for a month, but the tariff taxes on China are now in effect. Even though many of these tariff taxes were delayed, they are still scheduled to go into effect next month, and they have created unnecessary panic and uncertainty among businesses and families across the country and in New Hampshire.

I want to point out in the beginning, very clearly, that it is not foreign countries who pay these tariff taxes. It is Americans who pay these tariff taxes. These are tariff taxes on imported goods, meaning that the person or company who is importing the good will be footing the bill. And these costs will be passed on to American consumers and businesses.

You don't have to take my word for it. Best Buy's CEO said:

The vast majority of that tariff will probably be passed on to the consumer as a price increase.

And Walmart's CFO said:

There will probably be cases where prices will go up for consumers.

Columbia Sportswear's CEO said about tariffs:

We're set to raise prices. . . . [and] it's going to be very, very difficult to keep products affordable.

If we look at the cost of just the tariff taxes that were originally announced on Saturday, those would raise costs for the average American household by more than $1,200 a year. If we get into a trade war, with increasingly high tariffs on both sides--and that is what appears could be happening with China--those costs will go up even more.

President Trump campaigned on a promise to lower prices for everything. The tariffs that he is talking about would have the exact opposite effect.

I am glad the administration and the President listened to reason. He delayed the start of these tariffs. But I hope we don't have to be back here in a few weeks making this case again.

I want to make sure that people understand what these tariff taxes will do and highlight some of the areas where Americans would be directly affected.

First is energy. America imports more oil and gas from Canada than any other product. In New Hampshire, more than half of the gas in people's cars comes from Canada. These tariff taxes would make gas prices go up, and they could even lead to supply shortages because refinery and delivery infrastructure just doesn't turn on a dime.

President Trump's new 10 percent tariff tax on energy from Canada would also directly raise the cost of keeping warm for Granite Staters during the coldest months of this year. In New Hampshire, our No. 1 import from Canada is heating oil, and nearly a quarter of a million households in New Hampshire--that is about 40 percent of our households; more than Vermont, I think--rely on fuel oil to heat their homes. We are the second highest State in the Nation, next to Maine, that relies on No. 2 heating oil to heat our homes. Another 100,000 Granite Staters rely on propane, and about 30,000 homes use wood.

So that is about 60 percent of New Hampshire that relies on delivered fuel to stay warm. Much of that is coming from Canada. The average home in New Hampshire on heating oil uses about 600 gallons in a winter. And for older, draftier homes--and, sadly, we have a lot of those in New Hampshire, those who are further up north--families may be using upward of 1,000 gallons a winter. And with temperatures dipping as low as 20 below zero in the State in recent weeks, heating oil is a real necessity.

My constituents are already getting notices. I don't know, Senator Welch, if the same is true of your constituents, but I bet it is. They are saying those notices tell them their costs are going to go up if these tariffs go into effect.

On Sunday, I heard from Derek in Sandwich, NH, who received a letter from his heating supplier, Irving Oil, that informed him that his bill for heating oil would be going up.

The letter stated:

As you may be aware, the U.S. Government has announced a new tariff on imports from Canada, including the heating oil or propane that Irving Energy delivers to you.

The letter went on to describe that the tariff costs will be added to the price that he pays, even though he already has a contract.

Derek wrote to me:

I will now have less to spend locally. My local businesses will suffer through lost business and increased costs. Then their suppliers and employees will suffer.

It is a real hardship.

On Inauguration Day, this year, heating oil cost an average of $3.93 a gallon in New Hampshire. Tacking an ill-advised 10-percent tariff tax on heating oil from Canada could mean about $150 to $250 more for many in New Hampshire just to keep warm through the winter. And while for Elon Musk and his billionaire friends and the billionaire friends of the President $150 to $250 may not sound like a lot in a winter, there are a lot of people in New Hampshire for whom $150 to $250 is the difference between staying warm and being cold in the winter.

Let me also be clear: We don't use gas and heating oil from Canada because we don't produce it here in the United States. We do it because it makes logistical and economic sense, because in New England, we are at the end of the pipelines that are coming from Texas and the South.

The United States produces more oil than any other country in the history of the world. That was true during the last 3 years of the first Trump administration. It was true for the last four years of the Biden administration. But for New Hampshire, the St. John refinery in Canada simply provides us the closest, lowest cost supply. And, by the way, that refinery sources as much as half of its crude oil from the United States. So it is helping oil producers in the United States send their oil to the refinery, and we get it back in New Hampshire and New England.

President Trump campaigned on cutting energy prices in half. Reckless tariffs on Canada and Mexico would make those prices higher, not lower. New Hampshire families shouldn't be punished for what the Wall Street Journal has just called ``The Dumbest Trade War in History.''

That is not all. These tariff taxes will affect groceries because the United States imports 38 percent of our fresh vegetables, 60 percent of our fresh fruit, and more than 99 percent of the coffee that we drink. If we take all these together, Americans could be seeing an extra $200 a year on their grocery bills because of the Trump tariff tax. That doesn't include the longer term impact of taxes on farm equipment or fertilizer. America imports about 85 percent of the potash fertilizer we use, and much of that comes from Canada.

We already have record-high prices for coffee and eggs--if you can find eggs. Some groceries stores are sold out. One of the things that just happened in the last week is that because of the stop-work order that President Trump put on our services that we provide overseas to track bird flu, we are no longer tracking the bird flu that has helped drive up the cost of eggs. So it could get worse, and we are not even going to know about it until we see those prices reflected at the grocery store.

Any new 25 percent tariff tax on these imports would make our food more expensive at a time when families are already stretching and straining their household budgets.

Tariffs sometimes get talked about as a way to support American manufacturers, but that also misses the mark. Half of the products the United States imports are either raw materials or intermediate components, and that means the parts we make into cars or electronics. All of these inputs would get more expensive for American manufacturers, which is only going to make it harder for them to compete internationally.

One of the messages I hear regularly from businesses is that uncertainty is one of the hardest things for them to deal with. One example of this is a call I got 2 weeks ago from a small business owner in New Hampshire who sells specialized agricultural equipment both in the United States and overseas. This is a family business with five employees. His father founded it 50 years ago. He reached out specifically because he is worried about what tariffs on the components he buys from Canada could do to his business. For the specialized equipment that he needs, there aren't a lot of manufacturers out there. So he reached out to my office asking if he was going to have to pay $5,000 more in costs for each of the machines he sells.

He took over this business just a couple of years ago, and he has been working to invest to modernize it and expand. Now he has to worry about whether he can try to grow the business, whether he might face new foreign competition, or even if he can pay out bonuses or give raises to his employees. He can't even be certain what kind of pricing schedule he should send out for the year because his costs could go up $5,000 next month.

Last week, I heard from another small business, Granite State Packing. It is a startup meat processing company that is only 2 years old. They started just 2 years ago, and they already have 10 employees.

Last year, they actually got $1.6 million in a grant from USDA to expand their operations. That is going to allow them to double their workforce. In order to expand, they placed an order for $500,000 in new equipment because the specialized equipment they use isn't made in the United States.

Now, depending on how and when these tariffs go into effect and when their equipment might get delivered, they could be looking at a bill-- an increased bill--for $125,000. That is going to affect whether they can follow through on the expansion, whether they can actually add the staff they want to add, and they don't have any way of knowing if they are going to face an unexpected $125,000 bill because President Trump and this administration haven't made up their minds what they are going to do about these tariffs.

Over the weekend, I had another business owner from C&J Bus Lines. They run a great bus line from the seacoast of New Hampshire to Boston. The owner told me that they have ordered seven buses from Quebec, new buses. They are made in Quebec. These tariffs would add $150,000 to the cost of each bus. Between that and the higher fuel costs they would pay, they could be looking at $1.3 million more in added costs this year because of the Trump tariff tax.

No small business can easily just absorb a 25-percent price increase, nor can they plan on how to grow their business and keep providing good-paying jobs with this kind of uncertainty.

Make no mistake, I am glad the administration delayed these tariffs. I hope they understand how this action would affect America's small businesses and the impact this would have on the economy.

Let me finally just talk about the housing impacts because New Hampshire has an affordable housing crisis. These tariffs would make that worse.

Lumber makes up about 15 percent of the cost of building a house, and a lot of building materials, in addition to lumber, are imported. The National Association of Homebuilders wrote in part that ``imposing additional tariffs on these imports will . . . ultimately be passed on to home buyers in the form of increased housing prices.'' That means that this 25 percent tariff tax would directly add to the cost of building a home at a time when too many Granite Staters and too many Americans across the country already can't afford housing.

We shouldn't pretend that American tariffs are going to go unanswered. Other countries are going to retaliate. Getting into a tit- for-tat trade war is not going to help working Americans pay their bills.

Families across New Hampshire and America are worried about the high cost of housing, about the cost of groceries, and about what it costs to heat their homes. Business owners are similarly worried about costs or unexpected expenses. I am hearing regularly from them about the impact of the uncertainty on their ability to grow their businesses because of these tariffs.

President Trump promised during his campaign to ``lower the price of everything,'' but instead of doing something to lower costs, what he is doing now, what his administration is doing, is planning to add a 25- percent tariff tax to countless imports from Canada and Mexico, and they have already added a 10-percent tariff tax on goods coming in from China.

Again, while this was delayed at the last minute, this would raise costs for everything from groceries, to housing, to energy. It would disproportionately hit lower income families.

I am glad for the delay--I don't want people to misunderstand that-- but how is a business or a family supposed to plan when they don't know if important costs like gas or heating or groceries are going to spike any day?

I want to finish by reading a quote here. The quote says:

Tariffs are inflationary and would strengthen the dollar-- hardly a good starting point for a US industrial renaissance.

That is a quote from Scott Bessent, the new Treasury Secretary who just got confirmed, when he wrote to his investors just a year ago. I happen to agree with what he said then, but unfortunately the administration he just joined seems to be willing to risk more inflation.

These sweeping tariff tax increases would hurt American families, businesses, and workers. I am glad the taxes on goods from Canada and Mexico were delayed. I hope this administration can provide everyone with certainty that they won't go into effect next month.

I yield to my colleague from Vermont.

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