Trump's claims about Canadian tariffs may be true - but what about his own house?

President Donald J Trump has asserted that Canada's "supply management" programme effectively imposes 270% tariffs on US agricultural imports. At first sight, this is an improbable figure, but this article tends to confirm it, and that even some Canadian academics feel that the programme actually harms the Canadian economy.

Trump is trying to create the impression that the States are purer than pure in this area. In fact, while US tariffs have not been egregious, the States subsidise many multinational companies. There are indirect subsidies. Would Boeing have achieved its leading position in aircraft production if the corporation did not receive the lion's share of US Department of Defense plane contracts? This article goes further in listing eight companies with global reach which receive direct subsidies from government, from the federal level right down to local. Boeing accumulates $13,174,075,797 of these direct handouts. Other beneficiaries are General Motors ($3,494,237,703), Dow Chemical ($1,408,228,374), Goldman Sachs ($661,979,222), Google ($632,044,922), the Disney Corporation ($381,525,727), Wal-Mart - until recently the sole owner of Asda and potential 40% shareholder in an Asda/Sainsbury merger ($149,942,595) and Abercrombie and Fitch ($23,070,479). Many smaller companies which compete internationally are likely to be beneficiaries of lesser, but significant, amounts. The figures are from 2014, but they are unlikely to have diminished under Donald "Make America great again" Trump.

There are also agricultural subsidies, amounting to over $4bn per year. These have continued since the 1985 Food Security Act, in various forms, under both Democrat and Republican Congresses and Presidencies. They have the effect of creating a surplus which is dumped on the world market. This is often in the form of food aid, which has the perverse effect of destroying the livelihoods of local producers of, for instance, sugar and rice, and thus hobbling the economies of countries which the USA claims to aid. The EU is also guilty of this, but not to the extent that USA is.