It’s anyone’s guess how a 3% tax on digital services turns out to be a deal breaker for all trade negotiations between the U.S. and Canada.
Trump has issued yet another tirade about “attacking our Country”. This is stock phraseology, and it’s getting ancient. It’s his usual one-way rhetoric with appalling capitalizations of words that don’t need capitalizing.
3% of anything is an attack on America? How? Canada is being nice about it, as usual. It should be 15%, the benchmark for this type of tax.
Just a few points:
This tax is peanuts. He’s blocking trade talks worth much more for a few bucks?
This tax is incurred in Canada only.
He can’t stop Canada from imposing a tax anyway.
Canadian tax has absolutely nothing to do with the U.S.
The tech media sector is famous for ducking tax and often paying no tax at all worldwide for decades.
It’s terrible trade policy.
It’s lousy foreign relations.
Trump’s “King of the World” approach never works anyway.
He insists on issuing edicts to other countries, and those countries don’t like it.
Whatever he demands doesn’t happen. It just uses up a lot of media space.
Far more questionable is one glaring fact. Big Tech has received a lot of quite unnecessary favors from Trump. One of those favors is in the “Big Beautiful Bill” aka ready-made budgetary catastrophe. Federal revenue will be totally trashed by this idiotic bill, and all U.S. government spending will be severely compromised.
For example – The bill prohibits U.S. states from regulating AI for 10 years. This is effectively giving Big Tech a blank check for a decade with no compliance issues.
Simultaneously, he’s complaining about other countries raising their own revenue while destroying his own revenue base.
Trump is also accusing Canada of “copying the EU,” which has been far less patient with Trump edicts since 2016. Trump’s entire first term had no real effect on the EU, for all the bluster.
That’s likely to be the pattern for the future. Other countries will adopt the same perspective. Trump’s constant attacks against Canada and other countries will backfire badly. From “annexation” to “51st state,” he’s guaranteed failure in any negotiation with Canada.
The rest of the world has more than a few problems with American overreach, too. China, Australia, Japan, India, the EU, and others don’t have to listen to this drivel.
The U.S. could progressively get bypassed as new trade agreements and much cheaper alternatives emerge. That could have very negative long-term consequences.
The good news is that Canada can ignore this babble for a while.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
