President Donald Trump's upcoming tariffs on furniture were designed to be a bailout for the local furniture industry in the critical battleground state of North Carolina — but on the ground, manufacturers there have mixed feelings at best — and many are fearful the new import duties could actually hurt their local economy, CNN reported on Tuesday.
Alex Shuford, who runs Rock House Farm Furniture in Hickory, should theoretically benefit from the tariffs — but he told CNN he's worried, because his company doesn't just manufacture furniture, it also imports it and makes around 20 percent of its income from those imported items.
“We’ve got to be really careful that the effort to save us doesn’t do more damage than good,” Shuford told CNN. “Frankly, I’m worried that we’ll have some retailers that decide they can’t make it through. And then it hurts us all. The whole ecosystem gets damaged.”
Trump's stated reason for imposing tariffs is to strengthen U.S. domestic production and create a "fairer" trade balance between the United States and its partners.
In practice, however, tariffs often have complicated, adverse, and far-reaching effects on domestic production because they tend to affect the inputs local businesses need for production. A classic example is tariffs on steel, which are intended to help producers but end up hurting the bottom line, growth, and employment of all industries that use steel. Trump's first 2018 tariffs on steel famously endangered jobs at a nail plant in Missouri.
Trump does have some basis for worrying about North Carolina's furniture industry, the report noted. "As recently as 1999, North Carolina laid claim to about 80,000 furniture manufacturing jobs,' it stated.
"But the vast majority of those jobs have since vanished. North Carolina had just 28,000 furniture jobs as of August, the most recent month federal data was available. Apart from the pandemic era, furniture employment is at its lowest level since at least 1990."
However, Furniture Manufacturers Credit Association vice president David Johnston gave CNN a blunt assessment on whether Trump's tariffs would be of any help: “We’re not going back to the heyday of the 1990s. But we will get more expensive furniture.”
