Millionaire Trump Cabinet secretary: Jacking up car costs 'no big deal'
Trump cabinet secretary Wilbur Ross says if Trump’s proposed tariffs increase the costs of cars it’s “no big deal.” Ross is a multimillionaire, and most Americans are not.
Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, a multimillionaire, said it was “no big deal” and “trivial” if Trump’s planned tariffs on steel raise the cost of cars for consumers.
Trump announced plans to raise steel tariffs by 25 percent as part of an effort to counteract a slate of negative headlines that have plagued his administration.
The stock market reacted negatively to the plan, and economists have said the costs of many items, including cars, will be impacted if Trump goes through with his plan. So the administration sent Ross out to speak to CNBC to spin the poorly thought out policy.
Ross, continuing the Trump team’s callous indifference to the struggles faced by middle class Americans, said a cost increase for a car purchase would be no big deal.
He admitted that the tariffs would have “a broad effect” on the economy, but characterized it as “a trivial effect.”
“People talk about cars,” he continued, “there’s about 1 ton of steel in a car, and the price of a ton of steel is $700 or so, so 25 percent of on that would be 1 half of 1 percent price increase on the typical $35,000 car. So it’s no big deal.”
It would be out of touch for any official to say increasing the costs of something as essential to American life as a car is “no big deal,” especially as fewer Americans are able to afford vehicles of their own.
But it is even worse coming from Ross.
Ross is a multimillionaire with a reported net worth of around $700 million. Ironically, Ross has protested that estimate and insisted it should be much higher.
He told Forbes magazine that his net worth was $2.7 billion, but an investigation by the outlet found that he had wildly overstated his wealth.
Either way, Ross is a rich man who doesn’t have to budget for his car purchases like typical American families do.
Trump has surrounded himself with figures like Ross, with wealth far beyond what most people have, and even worse, no compassion for those outside of their wealth class. That is why he and Congressional Republicans had multimillionaire Steve Mnuchin concoct the unpopular tax legislation that was designed to make the uber-wealthy wealthier.
The Trump approach to the middle class is straight out of Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” school of thought.
Only instead of Antoinette, it is Ross asserting that increasing car costs is “no big deal.”
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