Coalition on Restaurant Tariffs Asks Congress to Lift Airbus Tariffs
Thousands of restaurants nationwide urged congressional leaders Jan. 28 to remove wines, cheeses, olive oil and other food products imported from Europe from the tariff list designed to punish the European Union for aircraft subsidies to Airbus. “Restaurants, bars, and shops, the social heart of our local communities, cannot afford 25 percent tariffs on European food and drink products and cannot recover with them in place. Our industry needs the tariffs to end immediately,” their Jan. 28 letter said. “As the crisis facing our industry deepens, the urgency of tariff relief grows. Our formula for survival through this economic crisis is simple: for each customer, we need to maximize sales of profit drivers like wine by the glass, and minimize the cost of inputs like cheese, olive oil, meat, and other food.”
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Tariffs are not effective in the goal of resolving the Airbus-Boeing dispute, the letter said. “In place for over a year, the restaurant tariffs have in no way pressured the European Union to end its aircraft subsidies, yet the United States has kept these tariffs in place through the greatest crisis our industry has ever faced. The United States and European Union remain far apart on even basic elements of the dispute, and negotiations, however well-intentioned, may stall out simply given that the aircraft industry needs subsidies now as much as any point in history.”
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, not Congress, has the power to decide which products are on the list, but members could ask USTR nominee Katherine Tai about the tariffs during her confirmation hearing.