Walt Rowen is co-chair of Small Business for America’s Future and President of Susquehanna Glass Company in Columbia, PA. Like many small businesses, he feels the pain of Trump’s tariffs.
Small businessman slams tariffs.
Watch Politics Done Right T.V. here.
Podcasts (Video — Audio)
Summary
Walt Rowen, co‑chair of Small Business for America’s Future and president of Susquehanna Glass, tells host Egberto Willies that Trump’s abrupt triple‑digit tariffs on imported mugs, tumblers, and other inputs will explode his costs overnight and force small manufacturers to pass on steep price hikes to consumers.
- Rowen’s $2 imported coffee mug now faces a 145 percent duty, raising his landed cost to roughly $5.50.
- Higher input prices mean a decorated mug that once retailed for $15 will soon cost $30, hammering Main Street shoppers.
- The century‑old factory employs forty Pennsylvanians who add value through engraving and laser decoration—jobs endangered by the tariff shock.
- Rowen argues tariffs function as a hidden tax on working families because importers and small firms cannot absorb the hit and must raise prices.
- He warns that the sweeping, “chainsaw” approach to trade policy will devastate entire supply chains unless dialed back and re‑negotiated thoughtfully.
A progressive lens underscores Rowen’s testimony: Trump’s tariff scheme acts as a regressive tax that transfers wealth upward, punishes community‑rooted businesses, and distracts from real solutions—like affordable childcare, universal health coverage, and targeted industrial policy—that would empower workers and small entrepreneurs rather than multinational titans.
Premium Content (Complimentary)
Donald Trump’s promise to slap tariffs on virtually every good that crosses a U.S. border is no longer a campaign sound bite; it is already being written into White House proclamations. Economists from left‑leaning and centrist think tanks agree on the outcome: higher prices, broken supply chains, and a regressive tax that squeezes Main Street far harder than Wall Street. That economic reality framed the recent Politics Done Right interview with Walt Rowen, co‑chair of Small Business for America’s Future and president of the 115‑year‑old Susquehanna Glass Company. Rowen spoke as a practitioner, not a theorist, and his plain‑spoken testimony dismantled the myth that tariffs make America stronger.
Rowen’s company adds value to imported blanks—coffee mugs, metal tumblers, European stemware—by etching, laser‑engraving, and screen‑printing them in Columbia, Pennsylvania. He employs forty local workers, some of whom can walk to the factory. Today, a ceramic mug that once landed on his dock for $2 faces a “duty rate” of roughly 145 percent. That spikes the landed cost to $5.50 before he engraves a single flower or company logo. At retail, the mug could jump from $15 to $30 overnight, a perfect illustration of what Brookings scholars Wendy Edelberg and Maurice Obstfeld call the “full pass‑through” of tariffs to consumers. Their review of the 2018–19 trade war found U.S. customers paid the entire surcharge and then some, while firms scrambled to renegotiate contracts and lobby for carve‑outs.
The burden falls heaviest on low- and middle-income families. Peterson Institute economists Kimberly Clausing and Mary Lovely calculate that Trump’s latest package would chop more than $2,600 a year from the median household’s after‑tax income, dwarfing any theoretical tax cut the former president dangles in campaign rallies. Center for American Progress analysts peg the broader inflationary hit at 2.3 percentage points this year—roughly $3,800 for an average household—while warning that the S&P 500 has already shed double‑digit value on tariff fears alone. The Council on Foreign Relations adds the academic consensus: importers pay the bill to the U.S. Treasury, but competitive pressure and thin margins mean they immediately pass the cost on; poor Americans, who devote a larger share of their budgets to goods, suffer most.
Rowen’s narrative captures the progressive critique in microcosm. He underscores that American manufacturing did not “die” because foreigners cheated; it evolved. His grandfather’s hand‑blown glassware faded when workers shunned the heat and European factories offered machine efficiency. Rather than offshoring everything, Susquehanna Glass pivoted toward high‑skill decoration work that thrives precisely because global supply chains deliver affordable blanks. Tariffs smash that symbiosis. They operate like a chainsaw, requiring surgical tools, and punish value-adding firms and communities that have innovated instead of relocating.
Progressives also hear Rowen’s implicit plea for public goods. Child‑care deserts limit his hiring. His employees obtain insurance through the Obamacare exchange, an assistance that removes the annual scramble to purchase health insurance, an arena far outside his expertise, that would otherwise divert time and resources that could be used to upgrade equipment or train workers. Tariffs raise revenue for the federal government, but they do so by hollowing out the very storefronts that anchor Main Streets. A saner policy would invest those revenues in universal childcare, Medicare-like health coverage, and strategic industrial policy—items that lift living standards without pitting Pennsylvanians against one another or immigrants from Mexico or China.
Moreover, the new levies invite foreign retaliation. The Brookings essay warns that earlier tariffs already reduced U.S. exports when other nations retaliated; expanding the battlefield tenfold guarantees wider damage. Small manufacturers that sell abroad—as Susquehanna Glass occasionally does with custom barware—risk becoming collateral damage in a tit‑for‑tat spiral that no local Chamber of Commerce can control.
Rowen’s testimony, therefore, performs a civic service. It exposes the tariff agenda as a top‑down tax hike that masquerades as economic populism. It explains, in community-rooted language, why tariffs are not a surgical tool for reshoring jobs but a blunt instrument that erodes margins, shuts down shops, and transfers wealth upward. And it challenges lawmakers—whether Democrat, Republican, or independent—to elevate the authentic voice of non-corporate business over the lobbying blitz of multinational conglomerates.
In short, Trump’s tariff crusade represents the opposite of the “America First” rhetoric that sells it. It mortgages the purchasing power of ordinary families to deliver a photo‑op at a shuttered factory gate. Progressives argue for a different path: nurturing genuine domestic value creation, funding the care economy, and regulating corporate excess, while trading fairly, not foolishly, with the wider world. Walter Rowen’s 115‑year‑old shop, and thousands like it, depend on Americans making that choice before the tariff bill arrives at the register.