When Chris Swonger, a leader in the U.S. spirits industry, heard that President Trump would be visiting his golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, this summer he knew he needed to be there, too. He had a seemingly counterintuitive request: zero tariffs on Scotch whisky imported into the United States.
For American whiskey producers, dominated by Kentucky’s bourbon industry, the prospect of higher prices for Scotch caused by tariffs has not been seen as an opportunity to edge out competition. The whiskey business has an interconnected, Atlantic-spanning relationship, they say, and both sides stand to lose.
“Our industry has thrived because we are so closely intertwined together,” said Mr. Swonger, the head of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. The tariffs on British spirits “would be detrimental to the U.S. economy and be detrimental to U.S. consumers,” he added.
In recent months, Mr. Trump has pushed to rewrite global trade and impose tariffs that he expects will raise trillions of dollars in revenue and increase American jobs. But some industries fear that the levies will lead to job losses, as tariffs unravel a complex web of supply chains, which economists expect to slow U.S. economic growth.
In May, Britain became the first country to announce a trade agreement with the United States, which lowered tariffs on British cars and airplane parts. But Mr. Trump kept an additional 10 percent tariff on almost all other imports. Efforts to rewrite that deal and push tariffs lower have intensified ahead of Mr. Trump’s state visit to Britain this week.
Each year, Scotch makers export 90 percent of their product, and their biggest market is the United States. But if the 10 percent tariffs persist, the United States will lose 3,300 jobs, and the U.S. hospitality industry would lose $300 million, according to the distilled spirits council.
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The post Tariffs Are Uniting Two Whiskey Heavyweights: Scotch and Bourbon appeared first on New York Times.
