MMAC president on tariff situation

Dale Kooyenga, president and CEO Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, has offered some of the harshest criticisms from the local business community on the tariff policies coming out of the White House.

“We’re looking at one of the largest tax increases in U.S. history,” Kooyenga said of the constant changes in international trade. “For a nation founded on ‘no taxation without representation,’ the fact that we have this level of additional costs placed on businesses, therefore consumers, and it’s at the discretion of just the executive branch, is not in the tradition of America.”

Kooyenga, a former Republican member of the Wisconsin Legislature, made the comments in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

In his role with the MMAC Kooyenga advocates and speaks with representatives of roughly 1,800 area companies.

More: Milwaukee area business leaders tell Sen. Baldwin about impact of tariffs, uncertainty

As international trade policy between the United States and the world continues to change at the behest of President Donald Trump, Kooyenga said there’s a level of fear in the business community of what could happen if a company were to speak up.

“Businesses are very scared of saying this themselves,” Kooyenga said. “ But 99% of the conversations that I’m having is these companies want to be off the record because they fear retaliation both from the government, which is super sad in a democracy, and they also fear retaliation from certain segments of the population that are very politically extreme in one direction or another.”

There is manipulation in international trade in some industries, Kooyenga said, but he would like to see Trump deal with these issues with a “businessman’s scapple, not a populist sledgehammer.”

“Our elected representatives should be weighing and fighting for the stakeholders in their districts,” Kooyenga said.

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, said he’s concerned about retaliation from other countries on Wisconsin businesses.

“I’m concerned about them losing overseas markets,” Johnson said in early March. “I’m concerned about the cost to builders. I’m concerned about retaliation against our farmers.”

Other federal elected members of the Wisconsin Republican delegation have not been publicly critical of the situation.

However, in private, Kooyenga said he and members of the MMAC have spoken with those elected Wisconsin Republicans who are weary of Trump’s plans.

“The sentiment that we’ve received back so far is that they also share a lot of the concerns that we’re hearing,” Kooyenga said.

But businesses continue to operate with the dark cloud of uncertainty hanging over every decision each company makes.

“Businesses don’t work this way,” Kooyenga said. “Businesses are going to start loading inventory in. So as we speak, they’re very quickly trying to get products in under these 90 days so it’s outside of the tariff window. But that creates all sorts of disruptions in the economy with labor availability, with insurance of your products. That’s absolutely not ideal.”

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: MMAC’s Kooyenga says businesses are ‘scared’ to speak up on tariffs